Functional vs. Object-Oriented: Comparing How Programming Paradigms Affect the Architectural Characteristics of Systems

• Briza Mel Dias USP http://orcid.org/0009-0004-6211-3307
• Renato Cordeiro Ferreira Jheronimus Academy of Data Science ’s-Hertogenbosch / USP https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7296-7091
• Alfredo Goldman USP https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5746-4154

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbqs.2025.15170

Resumo

This study compares the impact of adopting object-oriented programming (OOP) or functional programming (FP) on the architectural characteristics of software systems. For that, it examines the design and implementation of a Digital Wallet system developed in Kotlin (for OOP) and Scala (for FP). The comparison is made through a mixed-method approach. The self-ethnographic qualitative analysis provides a side-by-side comparison of both implementations, revealing the perspective of those writing such code. The survey-based quantitative analysis gathers feedback from developers with diverse backgrounds, showing their impressions of those reading this code. Hopefully, these results may be useful for developers seeking to decide which paradigm is best suited for their next project.

Palavras-chave: Software Architecture, Programming Paradigms, Object-Oriented Programming, Functional Programming, Empirical Software Engineering

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