OO or not OO?

[PeteM]

I consider myself to be a fairly decent amateur PHP programmer. However, my main experience (as a Professional IT developer/consultant) is in older programming languages such as COBOL. As a result I've never really got to grips with writing full blown OO code. I do of course use classes where beneficial. So what I want to know is, would this lack of OO expertise be a problem in the commercial PHP programming world?

Pete

[coopster]

Short answer? No.
Plenty of good code can be developed without using OOP. However, I would also encourage you to play around a bit with PHP5 OOP, it's easier than you may think. Don't let that old COBOL background scare you off ;)

[ncreegan]

I feel the same way about OOP, though I'm not a commercial programmer. Many of the everyday tasks that we do with PHP are so well suited to line by line that making the switch to OOP is tough.

Over the past year I've forced myself to start using OOP in the more menial projects, and it's paid off in all of the larger scale apps I've been working on. I've also found that when it's time to switch over to Java or C++ for a project, it's easier to get back into the swing of things.