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There are literally thousands of posts around the Internet on this question, and a lot of the time people seem to side with the coding practice they are most comfortable with…. understandably, but is it really an all or nothing scenario? should you code using just one ‘method’ (sorry couldn’t resist), or the other?

Users of Java, Ruby and other such object oriented languages, will quickly rebuff the proceduralists as unprofessional and intentionally or otherwise, make you feel as if you are an ‘illegitimate’ programmer/coder. If you have been coding PHP in a procedural format for many years, you may be beginning to feel you are quickly becoming ‘yesterdays news’, but is this a fair assessment?

PHP of course is a scripting language designed specifically for the www, though of course it is employed on many thousands of Intranets around the world, but it’s primary focus is on the Internet. Going back fifteen years, websites were smaller on the whole, and definitely less sophisticated, and websites that used PHP were (through lack of choice in PHP versions prior to PHP4), strictly procedural.

The way people used the Internet back then (and now to a certain extent), meant that procedural PHP was fine, it fitted the bill, so to speak. However with the advent of PHP4 which offered an object oriented path of sorts, and the introduction of other object oriented online languages, the online coding world began to change, but with this change, does this mean the ‘old’ procedural way of coding has now become obsolete?

Absolutely not. Hundreds of thousands of PHP coders have been and continue to write, excellent code employing the procedural style. The ones that use good programming practices see little reason to go the steep learning curve into object oriented PHP, and rightly so. If the goals of any website being developed can be written well using procedural style, then there is no need to change.

The Bottom line

If you are part of a team, programming is your job, or you want to start a career in web development, and/or the website you are building is a large and complex database driven application, then it is almost certain that object oriented programming will be a fundamental requirement, particularly if skills are broken down into specific ’skill sets’ ie, developer, graphic designer, database logic.

If you work on your own, or are involved in building small websites then procedural programming will be just fine. Don’t forget, procedural code has the added benefit of faster execution times than object oriented code.

For me personally, I let the projects’ requirements determine which approach is required, though I do find a combination of the two is often helpful.

For the most part, the way the game has been setup for online play, is near perfect. My only criticism, is that although everyone starts of at the same level, hard core gaming anoraks, will put in huge amounts of hours and get very skilled, very quickly, whilst casual gamers like myself, stay at a pretty mediocre level. The problem? the game doesn’t match skill levels when setting up a game. You are thrown into the lions’ den with everyone else, no matter what their skill level.

Despite this ‘flaw’, CoD4 is absolutely brilliant. It’s realistic in terms of it’s graphics, and that is on my low-def TV. Heck, the actual simulation of all the different guns and explosives may be realistic too, I don’t know, but when you are in the game, It’s as real as it gets, without the need for physical injury, Brilliant.

So why do I say it makes me sick? Well, I can’t play on it for too long, especially if I haven’t played it for a week or so (almost unheard of in the CoD4 online community, it’s that addictive). When I do, I start to feel really queezy in the stomach, and I have to stop.

I did mention these symptoms to my doctor once, whilst I was there for a different matter. He said it may be vertigo. I laughed, nay mocked at his suggestion silently in my head, saying, “I’m not exactly jumping off of very tall buildings, believing I’m falling to my doom, it’s a game”. However, I believe he is probably right.

You see, after about ten days of not playing it, I decided to have a quick match or two online. When the game kicked off, I felt like a noob, “which buttons do what again”? I was looking frantically all over the screen, wondering where the next lot of hostile fire is going to come from. It took less than ten minutes for that aweful queezy feeling to rear it’s unwanted head.

Thinking about it, I realised, that when I have been playing regularly, I am more confident and my eyes aren’t darting around all over the screen, I am more focused, I know what I’m looking for and what I want to do. In essence, I think when my eyes are darting around all over the place, not focused, my brain gets dizzy. It’s the only way I can explain it. I get the same feeling with Halo too, but not driving games.

The other odd thing is that my brother, who plays way more CoD4 than I do, and is way better too, came to visit one day. We switched the Xbox 360 on and fired up CoD4 for a few quick matches online, and my brother started to feel queezy too, something that he doesn’t suffer from at home. The only difference? He has a Hi-def TV, I don’t. Can this be part of the reason too?