Basic Programming Question: Advantages of OOP?

[Angrychile]

It's not that I don't understand the OOP paradigm or anything, in fact, I've heard of it's benefits, such as abstraction leading to stability, inheritance reducing reinvention-of-the wheel, etc. But for those with more experience than me, does it weigh well against it's disadvantages? Such as being slower (sometimes) or being too sophisticated when simplicity would work(such as developing a number of abstract classes for different functionality in good OOP practice verses just implementing a module without break it up).

PS: for the last example, it is good for larger programs. But with the philosophy behind OOP uplifting generic programming, it probably doesn't work well with small programs.

[doubleagent]

Do what works and makes most sense to you. Try out various paradigms and gauge how accurate you feel the criticism is.
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[Angrychile]

Again, I don't feel too confused by object oriented programming. I'm actually a visual person at times, believe it or not, so I can sort of see where it's nice as a more "visual" way of programming.

Anyhow, my main question was whether it meets it's disadvantages well.

[Genone]

It really depends on what you're doing. Some projects are more suited for OOP than others, e.g. GUI apps really benefit from OOP (as it resembles the visual appearance, OTOH for smaller data-processing projects I'd probably avoid the complexity. But that's really a case-by-case decision, and of course the whole subject of programming languages, styles and architectures is very subjective as people have different ways of thinking.

[doubleagent]