In declarative programming, your define things that should happen or be, but you don’t write any control flow. One interesting paradigm that does matter for WordPress is declarative programming. The Paradigm We Won’t Discuss: Declarativeīrazilian Rock Band CSS’s first album. Fundamentally, understanding these paradigms well allows you to be more comfortable writing your code. There is very real tribalism that has object-oriented programmers and functional programmers sneering at each other in some circles and circumstance. Paradigms matter because they often travel along with a specific culture of writing programs and thinking about them. (Procedural and object-oriented, so you aren’t left hanging.) And internally, WordPress strongly uses two of the three paradigms we’ll talk about to create what it does. Something useful that a computer can do is make web pages, like WordPress does. What differentiates these three major programming paradigms that matter for WordPress developers is that they are a set of assumptions and lenses through which one can understand and construct a program which makes a computer do something useful.

To cite a definition which is relevant, the American Heritage Dictionary says a paradigm is:Ī set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline What Paradigms Are and Why They Matterīefore we start breaking down all the programming paradigms we’ll cover, it makes sense to be clearer about what we mean by “paradigms”. Contrary to popular belief, there isn’t a “right” or “wrong” answer ever. Our goal today is to clarify what these three major paradigms in software development are, how they relate to each other, and which you’ll want to use when. What’s this “OOP” thing people seem obsessed with? Am I doing that? Should I be?įundamentally, this article is for people in a place like that. But eventually as you go along, you start to wonder. When you’re brand new to development in PHP or JavaScript, you don’t really need or want to think too hard about programming paradigms.

Suitability of procedural programs