Object oriented programming is definitely the way to go. OOP came about as a series of incremental improvements made to procedural programming. First came the

Object oriented programming is definitely the way to go. OOP came about as a series of incremental improvements made to procedural programming. First came the idea of segmenting functionality into more manageable 'building blocks' called modules that worked together to provide the functionality of the entire system. Next came abstract data types which incorporated the idea of treating a set of data and the logical operations on that data as a single unit. Different ADTs were naturally stored in separate program modules. Next came the idea of information hiding, or separating out a module's interface from its internal structure. Information hiding serves two major purposes: a) allowing a module implementer greater freedom in changing how a module works without distrubing clients of the module and b) making it so a user does not have to understand everything about a module in order to use any part of the module. Having figured out modularity, abstract data types, and information hiding, programmers then turned to the task of how to better reuse code. Structured programming reduced the amount of duplicate code in a system, but still had quite a bit of code with only slight differences. Inheritance was developed as a mechanism to deal with this problem. Basically ADTs, now called classes, were arranged in a tree structure with the most general classes at the top and the most specific classes at the bottom. Several additional mechanisms were added to the system that allow child classes to have access to their parent class definitions and for runtime polymorphism. More than 64 words, I know. However, because seeing how OOP evolved out of the solutions to procedural programming problems helped me to understand it and see its value, it seemed like it may help you as well.