

Ask HN: Procedural or object oriented programming? - Doug12

Hey everyone.<p>I recently deleted my scripting language since I wasn&#x27;t happy with it, and I knew it wasn&#x27;t popular anyway. I want to know if I should make the language more oriented or procedural, but am unsure myself.<p>So I ask you: out of the two, do you prefer procedural or object oriented programming?
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ColinWright
Creating a language for someone else rarely works - you need to create it for
your own compelling use case. If you don't find it essential and natural for
something, why should anyone else? And if there is a compelling use case,
write up why your language is a better fit. People will then prove you wrong,
and if you can convincingly refute all their arguments, then you might have
something.

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kyllo
Most object-oriented languages are also procedural, so that isn't a dichotomy.

Procedural vs. functional and imperative vs. declarative are more interesting
dichotomies to focus on. If you are designing a new language, especially one
for a particular problem domain, it generally makes sense to make the language
fairly high-level and declarative. SQL is the classic example of a declarative
domain specific language, you use the language to specify _what_ data to
retrieve, and behind the scenes the database engine figures out _how_ to
retrieve it.

Anyway, what is your purpose or goal in creating a programming language? Are
you trying to create a general purpose language that can substitute for
Python/Ruby/Perl? Or are you trying to solve any specific problem with it?

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SamReidHughes
Procedural vs. object oriented isn't an interesting distinction. Every good
general purpose language in use supports some sort of run-time polymorphism,
but it's an open definition as to what constitutes true object orientation.

