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Programming paradigms that change how you think about coding

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Re: Programming paradigms that change how you think about coding

#11

Post by nly »

jameshart wrote: post #10

This is a substantial piece of writing with information many here would find interesting; putting it behind a buzzfeed list style headline does it a disservice. One step short of calling it "Six weird programming paradigms that will blow your mind".

I thought it was a tiny but deliberate master-stroke of tongue-in-cheek irony. Or maybe the author was really after that buzzfeed crowd ;) I any case, I bet I wasn't the only one who thought "well, HN is going downhill fast" first, and came out glad my prejudices were tested.

Re: Programming paradigms that change how you think about coding

#13

Post by weland »

jameshart wrote: post #10

This is a substantial piece of writing with information many here would find interesting; putting it behind a buzzfeed list style headline does it a disservice. One step short of calling it "Six weird programming paradigms that will blow your mind".

It also includes quite some information that isn't exactly right.

Re: Programming paradigms that change how you think about coding

#15

Post by lomnakkus »

nly wrote: post #12
z3phyr wrote: post #7

Since 'functional' is not mentioned, I will assume that it is mainstream now!

Or maybe it just won't 'change the way you think about coding'

I think that depends a lot on what you mean by "functional". If "functional" means "everything is immutable" then I can guarantee that you'll learn a lot by programming that way. If you mean "first-class functions" then I cannot -- although you still might. You could probably program in Scheme (say) as if it were C with side effects all over the place, but that wouldn't teach you anything except a different syntax. OTOH, coding something non-trivial in Haskell would teach you a lot -- even if you don't end up using/liking it.

(Aside: I was somewhat disappointed by the blogger calling out the "Wolfram Language" as something special or to be admired. It's a ridiculous ad-hoc hodgepodge of a language. I stress the word language.)

Re: Programming paradigms that change how you think about coding

#17

Post by ChrisGaudreau »

nly wrote: post #12
z3phyr wrote: post #7

Since 'functional' is not mentioned, I will assume that it is mainstream now!

Or maybe it just won't 'change the way you think about coding'

If you don't know FP and you learn FP, then it will almost certainly change the way you think about coding.

Re: Programming paradigms that change how you think about coding

#18

Post by bnegreve »

z3phyr wrote: post #7

Since 'functional' is not mentioned, I will assume that it is mainstream now!

According to Wikipedia, functional programming is an example of declarative programming [1], which is mentioned in the article.

This is not immediately obvious to me, here's why (from the same wikipedia article [1]):

While functional languages typically do appear to specify "how", a compiler for a purely functional programming language is free to extensively rewrite the operational behavior of a function, so long as the same result is returned for the same inputs. This can be used to, for example, make a function compute its result in parallel, or to perform substantial optimizations (such as deforestation) that a compiler may not be able to safely apply to a language with side effects.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming

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