Does procedural programming have any advantages over OOP?
[Edit:] Earlier I asked this as a perhaps poorly-framed question about when to use OOP versus when to use procedural programming - some responses implied I was asking for help understanding OOP. On the contrary, I have used OOP a lot but want to know when to use a procedural approach. Judging by the responses, I take it that there is a fairly strong consensus that OOP is usually a better all-round approach but that a procedural language should be used if the OOP architecture will not provide any reuse benefits in the long term.
However my experience as a Java programmer has been otherwise. I saw a massive Java program that I architected rewritten by a Perl guru in 1/10 of the code that I had written and seemingly just as robust as my model of OOP perfection. My architecture saw a significant amount of reuse and yet a more concise procedural approach had produced a superior solution.
So, at the risk of repeating myself, I'm wondering in what situations should I choose a procedural over an object-oriented approach. How would you identify in advance a situation in which an OOP architecture is likely to be overkill and a procedural approach more concise and efficient.
Can anyone suggest examples of what those scenarios would look like?
What is a good way to identify in advance a project that would be better served by a procedural programming approach?
Answer
I like Glass' rules of 3 when it comes to Reuse (which seems to be what you're interested in).
1) It is 3 times as difficult to build reusable components as single use components
2) A reusable component should be tried out in three different applications before it will be sufficiently general to accept into a reuse library
From this I think you can extrapolate these corollaries
a) If you don't have the budget for 3 times the time it would take you to build a single use component, maybe you should hold off on reuse. (Assuming Difficulty = Time)
b) If you don't have 3 places where you'd use the component you're building, maybe you should hold off on building the reusable component.
I still think OOP is useful for building the single use component, because you can always refactor it into something that is really reusable later on. (You can also refactor from PP to OOP but I think OOP comes with enough benefits regarding organization and encapsulation to start there)