[chucker]

I've been coding for years, and I have enough experience to pick up new languages easily, understanding the differences in syntax, features, etc. This all works really well for procedural programming.

...and there's the dilemma. It goes without saying that procedural programming is on the way out to make room for object-oriented paradigms. I understand very well that this isn't a choice by the people up there to deliberately make my life as a programmer hard, but that a lot of things, especially in a GUI, simply necessitate it, or, to say the least, make the resulting application lot more efficient.

When I write code, my brain has a workflow in mind. I could easily lay out the code as a flowchart instead, in OmniGraffle, for instance. It would be a graphical 1:1 representation. Trouble is: you can't do that with OOP. OOP isn't linera in any way; it doesn't follow the "this happens after that" or "under these conditions, this happens next" schemes at all. It's driven by events and other triggers, and while there may be micro-units where the same linearity applies, it just doesn't work that way for the entire app. It shouldn't. It wouldn't really work well that way.

But that's the way my mind lays it out, making me inherently incompatible with the concepts of OOP. No matter how much I understand them. I get what a class is, what an object is, what a method is and what messages are. But that still doesn't help me. I could continue as before and buy random books about this language and that language, or read tutorials or "electronic books" online. But no matter what, the stumbling block will always be the same: I don't think that way!

So what I need is a way to start learning to think different (hah). I don't much care for theory, so I'd much prefer to learn it by example, and since my most recent and perhaps most favored language is Ruby, there would be bonus points if it used that. (Preferably, no C++ and no Java; Objective-C, Python, C# and similar would be okay.)

So, any ideas? I realize this is a very… vague request, but if someone can think of something, that'd be great. Doesn't have to be a book.