Lesson 3.6 Note of caution

If you're lucky you may find your mind sparking with a few ideas already. I know I did at this point. There's no harm in wandering off for a few hours, days or even weeks to have a play and learn under your own steam. There's one important thing to bear in mind. I have given you a hammer. Not literally. I'm not going to mail one to you. Frankly, what sort of a weirdo would? No, I have metaphorically given you a hammer. A tool. It's important not to see everything as a nail.

Think of it like learning to drive a manual gearbox car. You've learnt clutch control and how to get the vehicle moving. We haven't been over gear changes yet. Yes, you can get a few places in first gear but you'll be a lot slower, be quite noisy with all the revs and your fuel bills would be quite big.

I would say that what I have covered so far is the basics of what is broadly known as procedural programming. It is the bedrock of conventional coding. It is fine and dandy but somewhat limited. I won't go into the exact reasons why. Firstly, like all things in IT, someone might take issue with a reason I give. Secondly, it would be too big of a digression. You could write a book on the differences. A very boring one. Read by people with brown polyester ties.

Anyway, procedural programming has been largely superceded by a new school called Object Oriented Programming. I have to be honest. That phrase has probably discouraged thousands of people from attempting programming. It's such a dry, intimidating name. They should have called it Programming made a bit easier, Coding with less headaches or Dear heavens, where has all the spaghetti gone? It's no magic bullet. It's open to abuse as much as any coding practice. However, done properly, I would argue that life is easier with Object Oriented Programming. The majority of the software development industry would agree.

I guess what I'm saying is, stick with me. We're going to cover gear changes, traffic ettiquette, car maintenance, handbrake turns and racing lines. Speaking metaphorically of course.