Cognitive Differences Between Procedural Programming and Object Oriented Programming

Abstract

Software development is moving from procedural programming towards object-oriented programming (OOP). Past studies in cognitive aspects of programming have focused primarily on procedural programming languages. Object-oriented programming is a new paradigm for computing. Industry is finding that programmers are having difficulty shifting to this new programming paradigm. Findings in prior research revealed that procedural programming requires Piaget's formal operation cognitive level. New from this research is that OOP also requires Piaget's formal operation cognitive level. Also new is that OOP appears to be unrelated to hemispheric cognitive style. OOP appears to be hemispheric style friendly, while procedural programming is preferential to left hemispheric cognitive style. The conclusion is that cognitive requirements are not the cause for the difficulty in shifting from procedural to OOP. An alternative possibility to the difficulty is proactive interference of learning procedural programming prior to learning object oriented programming.