Development Cost of Procedural Programming vs. OOP?

Question

I come from a fairly strong OO background, the benefits of OOD & OOP are second nature to me, but recently I\'ve found myself in a development shop tied to a procedural prog

Answer 1

Most all of these questions are confounded by the problem that individual programmer productivity varies by an order of magnitude or more; if you happen to have an OO programmer who is one of the gruop at productivity x, and a "procedural" programmer who is a 10x programmer, the procedural programmer is liable to win even if OO is faster in some sense.

There's also the problem that coding productivity is usually only 10-20 percent of the total effort in a realistic project, so higher productivity doesn't have much impact; even that hypothetical 10x programmer, or an infinitely fast programmer, can't cut the overall effort by more that 10-20 percent.

You might have a look at Fred Brooks' paper "No Silver Bullet".