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I don't really agree that paradigms are more important than programming languages the way the author suggests here. Most paradigms are best captured in particul
by mattnewport 9y ago
I don't really agree that paradigms are more important than programming languages the way the author suggests here. Most paradigms are best captured in particular languages oriented around those paradigms. I can learn and understand functional programming paradigms much better in a functional programming language than in C. As a naive 18 year old many years ago who knew a bit of BASIC, C++, Java and Pascal I started to think all programming languages were "entirely similar". Being introduced to ML at university rather disabused me of that notion.
I guess my point is that paradigms are important, but that they are best learned in the context of languages that are designed around those paradigms and that learning them can actually be hampered if you are only familiar with languages that don't have good support for those paradigms. New paradigms are also often only really introduced and proved effective in the context of new languages designed around those paradigms. Dreaming up a new paradigm is rather an academic exercise if no language exists that can well represent that paradigm and can be used to build actual working systems proving the paradigm useful and effective.
- rrobukef 9y agoI had a different process. I started with thinking (Basic, assembler and Java) that different paradigms were uniquely suited for different problems. Learning logic programming and functional programming changed this notion. It's possible to reduce a paradigm to explicit boilerplate code. In most cases you can reduce the boilerplate to almost nothing and get mostly idiomatic code without changing your initial approach. The only thing left are non-functional requirements and while you could get a constant factor of slowdown, most compilers take care of 99% and you won't change complexities.