> My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural languages better than functional ones. I wonder if that last bit was as unfashionable a statement when he made it as it would be now.
> I liked procedural languages better than functional ones. (Emphasis, mine). I suspect that he understood functional languages quite well. He just didn't like them. I like some aspects of FP, but there are other aspects that I don't like. My own development style is a ghastly chimera of techniques, technologies and jargon that coagulate into a disgusting bouillabaisse that makes everyone go "tsk, tsk," but that alwa…
Though C programming is usually about effects, effects occur in expressions which usually return a value except in cases when their type is "void" (which was a later introduction into C, possibly from C++).
C even has an if/then conditional that yields a value, the ternary operator x ? y : z, which is a more strongly typed version of (if x y z).