Every so often I see a question on SO which forces me to spend half an hour editing a really bad Wikipedia article. The article is now only moderately bad. In the part that bears on your question, I wrote as follows: In computer science, a function or expression is said to have a side … Read more
In a procedural program, the code is king and the data is subordinate. In other words, you have programs which act on data and they’re not usually tightly bound. In the OO world, objects are the primary thing of interest. An object consists of data and the code that is allowed to act on that … Read more
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 … Read more
Background: You asked for a “simple explanation” which suggests: You want a no-nonsense overview without jargon You want something that will help you learn from the beginning You have discovered that no two people ever answer the question the same way, and it’s confusing. That’s the reason you are here asking for a simple explanation. … Read more
Functional Programming Functional programming refers to the ability to treat functions as values. Let’s consider an analogy with “regular” values. We can take two integer values and combine them using the + operator to obtain a new integer. Or we can multiply an integer by a floating point number to get a floating point number. … Read more
Imperative There are several sub-paradigms of the imperative programming paradigm, such as the procedural or the object-oriented programming paradigms. In the imperative programming paradigm, you describe the algorithm step-by-step, at various degrees of abstraction. Examples of programming languages which support the procedural paradigm: C (and most other legacy languages) PHP, mostly In some sense, all … Read more
All of them are good in their own ways – They’re simply different approaches to the same problems. In a purely procedural style, data tends to be highly decoupled from the functions that operate on it. In an object oriented style, data tends to carry with it a collection of functions. In a functional style, … Read more
A functional language (ideally) allows you to write a mathematical function, i.e. a function that takes n arguments and returns a value. If the program is executed, this function is logically evaluated as needed.1 A procedural language, on the other hand, performs a series of sequential steps. (There’s a way of transforming sequential logic into … Read more