Data Oriented OR Object Oriented Programming?

    ^--OOP      VS     DDP--^

This topic is important when developing a game engine. Let's quickly go over the definition of both. 

So object oriented programming or OOP is a programming style that represents attributes of data as objects and  is associated with procedures known as functions or methods depending on what language you are using. These objects are usually instances of classes and are used to interact with other classes to formulate an application such as a game. Examples of object oriented languages would be C++ Java, and C#. 

Data Oriented Programming or Data Driven Programming (DDP (Not Disney's Dining Plan)) is a programming style in which the program statements describe the data to be matched and the processing required rather than defining a sequence of steps to be taken. Languages that follow this would sed and AWK. This is not limited to the other OOP languages as well

These languages that are designed for DDP are known as line-oriented languages because the data sequences are in lines as they go into the input stream.

These are two of the different programming styles we have been taught so far in my program but there are countless programming styles like the imperative style,  functional style, logic style and so on. Each style is used for different practices. 

There are benefits to both of these styles and there are some objections one might have to using one or the other. Most of the benefits for one language are the objection for the other language. For example, user friendly readability is a benefit to OOP while it becomes an objection in DDP. The reason for this is because the when data is organized in OOP it's put into objects which is easy for the programmer to read and understand. With DDP, it's a different way of thinking. The data is streamlined together. So say there are multiple enemies and they all have two properties such as health and armor. The data would be organized by a long stream of all enemies health, then all enemies armor. This becomes a little more difficult to read as a programmer. However, the benefits from this is it's more cache coherent. Being cache coherent means to be consistently store local data in the cache. This is good because the cache doesn't have to always be switching data and wasting valuable time. OOP is not very cache coherent and would be one of the objections one might have to using that style of programming. 

So far in our game we are using OOP because it is very easy to work with since we have had more experience with it than DDP. We hope to transfer our style to DDP to optimize our run times in the later semester.