Procedural programming is preferred than simple sequential programming because of its easy maintainability. These are the advantages of procedural programming:

• Reusing the same code at different places in the program without copying it is possible
• Easier to keep track of program flow than the GOTO or JUMP commands
• Its modular or structured compared to other programming language

For a programming language to be called procedural, it has to support procedural programming by a clear concept of a procedure and a syntax that define the procedure. The universally accepted example of procedural programming is the ALGOL. Other examples are: Ada, ASP, BASIC, C C++, ColdFusion, COBOL, PHP, PL/C and others.

Object-Oriented Programming

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm that makes use of “objects” to design programs and applications. The techniques used for this program is varied such as inheritance, modularity, polymorphism and encapsulation. Object-oriented programming came about as a method to tackle the perceived software crisis where hardware and software became more and more complex. OOP emphasizes modularity or the discrete units of programming logic.

Simula programming language was the first to use the concepts behind OOP such as objects, classes, subclasses, virtual methods, coroutines, garbage collection and discrete event simulation. Smalltalk was the first programming language classified as “object-oriented”.

Object-oriented programming is a collection of cooperating objects instead of using instructions. Each object is capable of receiving and sending messages and processing data. This enables greater maintainability and flexibility in programming.

Functional Programming

Functional programming is a programming paradigm that uses computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions. It does not encourage the use of state and mutable data. Its main emphasis is the application of functions.

“Purely” functional programming languages are mostly used in academia not in commercial software. There are, however, functional programming languages used in commercial applications such as Erlang, R (statistics), Mathematica, Haskell, ML, J and K (financial analysis) and programming languages specifically for domains such as XDLT. Lambda calculus is the foundation of majority of the models of functional programming.

Logic Programming

Logic programming or the logical programming is employing mathematical logic for computer programs. This view originated from John McCarthy's advice-taker proposal. Logic is entirely a declarative representative language using a theorem-prover or model-generator to solve problems. The job of solving problems is carried out by the programmer who can asses the truth of the programs and the theorem-prover or model-generator that can solve problems capably.

Parallel Programming

Parallel programming or parallel computing is carrying out in real-time some combination of multiple programming instructions and data on multiple processors to reach quicker results. This is based on the method of problem solving divided into smaller tasks executed with coordination.

In a parallel computing system, there is more than one processor to carry out parallel processing. Flynn's taxonomy is considered one of the most accepted taxonomies of parallel computing. It divides parallel computers into: whether all processors carry out similar instructions at the same time (single instruction/multiple data- SIMD) or each processor could carry out different instructions (multiple instruction/multiple data- MIMD).