Procedural isn't wrong. OOP isn't right. They're used for different
purposes. The fact is, OOP is a trade off for flexibility and
scalability over speed; speed in development, speed in execution.
Procedural programming has its place (ask any game developer).
Procedural programming is a necessary and important first step in
learning how to code. It's the best way to learn how programming works
because it's a simplified approach and won't get in the way of learning
basic syntax.
People with no programming experience will not understand abstract
concepts like classes, inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation -
the very things that make up OOP.
OOP is a specialized dialect, built upon the basic language of
programming. If you don't learn the basics, you can't truly learn the
dialect. It's akin to learning phrases from a French phrase book and
going to Paris on vacation versus learning how conjugation and verb
tenses work combined with vocabulary. Who is going to be more
successful at carrying on rudimentary conversations, or understanding
what's being said to them?
If we take two students and you teach them OOP for 1 month and I teach
them procedural for two weeks and then OOP for two weeks, my student
will be further along than your student. The reason is simple. When you
learn the fundamentals first you have a greater capacity for
understanding of more advanced topics.
If you take somebody snowboarding and force them to learn how to do a
720 without teaching them anything else, they will eventually be able to
do a 720. If you instead teach them all the basic moves, how to enter
and exit tricks, and then move into 180s, 270s and 360s, they'll be much
better at snowboarding in general and will naturally learn 720s soon after.
Plus, if you sit down with non-programmers to teach them OOP, and you
have to teach them the basics first, you will find yourself naturally
teaching them procedural programming because every time you try to move
into topics OOP, your students will get lost and you'll end up circling
back to explain the basics again.
OOP is not a beginner topic.
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