Programming Paradigms, Turing Completeness and Computational Thinking (2020)

What about the differences? How are students supposed to learn if not for making contrasts between patterns and explore each one separately to get an idea of what makes them tick?

Not easily, but I'll try. And thanks for asking.

> It's "just" control theory no?

That's the view from the old paradigm looking "forward". From the new paradigm looking "backward" control theory is the beginning of the new paradigm. To me feedback and control theory looks like a slow and painful rediscovery of Wiener and company.

Cybernetics grew out of the study of "loops of causality". In logic, "A = not A" is a contradiction, in cybernetics it's an oscillator.

It's very difficult to describe the paradigmatic shift. I could point to Shannon and Wiener. Shannon's paper is in many ways the epitome of the scientific paradigm that started with Newton and could be demarcated by Einstein. Already with Quantum Mechanics we're starting to get into the new thing (but the name "mechanics" kind of points to the old way still.) The crux is the change of emphasis from concrete and static to context and relationship, the "verbs" rather than the "nouns".

Consider the cannon vs. the heat-seeking missile. In the first case the science is ballistics, in the second it is feedback and control (with ballistics as a kind of substrate) and the physical properties of the mechanism are secondary to the metaphysical properties (the "causal loops" embodied in the mechanism.) Note that the cannon also has its feedback loops. After you fire you measure the result and adjust the aim and so on. The paradigms aren't separate, they all co-exist, it's a change of attention and emphasis. And speed, of course.

It almost doesn't matter what the missile is made of, electric circuits, clockwork, fluidics, etc. The crucial aspects of it that define its behaviour are intangible not physical. That's why Cybernetics can be applied to living systems just as well as machines.

(FWIW, I never went in much for the "Second-order" cybernetics, it got too metaphysical for my taste.)

Anyhow, I hope that makes more (rather than less) sense. :)

"Paradigm" is something science historians talk about.

We can talk about objects, functions, data structures, abstractions, interfaces, complex compositions, etc. without mentioning paradigms. We can plan software that follows rules without involving a paradigm. We can teach a course just on functional programming and still not talk about it as a paradigm.

With all the words we have to describe the parts of programming, "paradigm" seems as generic and vague as "concept" or "thing". But "paradigm" does have a specific meaning, and it's not relevant in practice.