The Object Oriented Paradigm

The Object Oriented paradigm (OOP) provides many features which help in effective software development and maintenance and hence reduce costs. A few of those features are listed below :
 

• Flexibility of design - designing of software is very flexible. You could almost say too flexible!
• Reusability, easy interfacing and library support - these features are a result of the abstraction of object modules which the OOP offers.
• Referential Dependency - it depends on the declaration of a module remaining unchanged. It may be argued that this puts constraints during the modification of a program but what we should keep in mind is that modifications can be enforced on modules after inheriting them. Inheritance of modules provided by the OOP helps in solving this tricky problem.
• Data Integrity Dependency - this is supported by the information hiding features provided by the OOP.
• Security - Security of the Virtual Machine is also provided for by OOP to a certain extent. But, even in languages which do not have the security at the heart of the issue, we can add security features by abstraction and inheritance. For instance in C++ (which provides pointers to address memory directly), we can use the concept of 'smart pointers' which can be easily implemented using the OOP.
• Good Debugging - The OOP provides a mixed bag of features as far as debugging goes. On one hand, abstraction provides a good mechanism to implement good debugging features and on the other hand, polymorphism and inheritance can make debugging a difficult job.

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