Re: Classes/Objects compared to SRVPGMs

Takken, Cor wrote:

What I do want to point out - and yes, I will keep on hammering about
that ;) - is that 'old fashioned' programming styles (what we are used
to and love in RPG, Cobol, C and what have you in that area) can never
be compared in functionality and use to OO programming styles with the
whole concept of inheritance and reuse through classes/objects and what
have you which is used in Smalltalk, Java, C++ and the likes.

I'm not going to get too far down this particular alley, because it's a blind one, but the idea that OO programming is inherently better than procedural is a topic that's been beaten to death here, Cor. The suitability of a giving programming technique for a given purpose depends a lot upon the programmer, but the idea that RPG can't provide code reuse is simply untrue.

We can argue all day about whether inheritance is actually a benefit - the OO experts seems to be leaning more towards composition rather than inheritance as it becomes clear that complex object hierarchies lead to brittle software - but at the end of the day, the trick is productivity and procedural programming still has its place.

To insist otherwise is to have never written business logic with a good procedural programmer.

Joe