The Return of Procedural Programming

There used to be a growing trend to write code in an object-oriented style, even in languages that were not designed for it. Today, there is almost an opposite trend.

Two newly-popular languages, Go and Rust, omitted object-oriented fundamentals like classes and inheritance altogether. Swift has classes but the official documentation recommends using plain structures instead. TypeScript and Scala are both commonly used in a functional instead of object-oriented style.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the increasing popularity of functional programming, but procedural programming has also seen a resurgence in recent years. The increasing popularity of Go and Rust are part of this trend, but there has also been increased interest in new low-level systems languages like Zig, Odin, and Jai—all of them procedural.

Why is procedural coming back? What are its pros and cons compared to object-oriented and functional styles of programming? Could you benefit from embracing the procedural style? In this talk, you’ll find out!