Which are C# 4.0 programming paradigms?

Question

• Which are C# 4.0 programming paradigms?
• In what category does extension methods fall into?

A programming language can support multiple paradigms. For example, programs written in C++ or Object Pascal can be purely procedural, or purely object-oriented, or contain elements of both paradigms.

In object-oriented programming, programmers can think of a program as a collection of interacting objects, while in functional programming a program can be thought of as a sequence of stateless function evaluations. When programming computers or systems with many processors, process-oriented programming allows programmers to think about applications as sets of concurrent processes acting upon logically shared data structures.

Just as different groups in software engineering advocate different methodologies, different programming languages advocate different programming paradigms.

Source: Wikipedia

Answer 1

C# done right is to use it in an object oriented way as the object oriented paradigm is it's main pillar. This has a heavy impact on your program structure, much more than the functional elements of C#.

You can use the functional elements (LinQ) when they make a solution to a problem easier to express, to simplifiy implementations. This feature/paradigm is not meant to structure a whole program.

For easy tasks, you can use C# in a purely imperative way.

But: C# should never be programmed in a procedural way (for example methods with many out arguments).

So, to answer your questions: C# is based upon an imperative, object oriented paradigm with declarative/functional elements.

Extension Methods are just syntactic sugar to extend an existing class, so you don't need to derive from it. I'd say they're an element of object oriented programming, as they allow you to work on instances of objects and they allow you to extend existing classes with external components.