Object Oriented Programming

As a novice programmer and as someone who started learning programming with C, OOP just seems annoying to me. Seems as though it's easier to accomplish the same tasks without it. Is it actually necessary to learn it?

>>42
I didn't say templates didn't suck. They have a number of design flaws, yes, but they are definitely not "unwanted baggage".

I'll say it:  Templates suck.  They're a compile-time band-aid for the fact that C++ isn't truly polymorphic.