> I’ve always thought of a program as just a more elaborate series of step by step commands...Just haven’t made that mental leap yet, probably because I’m so us

> I’ve always thought of a program as just a more elaborate series of step by step commands...Just haven’t made that mental leap yet, probably because I’m so used to thinking the other way. Yes, it's a hard mental leap the first few times. And there's another leap to logic programming that is almost as large as the jump to functional programming. Perhaps a physics analogy would be useful. A physicist may use a local, kinematic view: the object is here and has this velocity, and this force on it, so in a fraction of an instant that will make it move this much, and in another fraction of an instant it will move this much more... A physicist may also use a global view: if I consider the set of all possible paths that start at point A and end at point B, what distinguishes the one an object will actually take? Both are useful, and things that are obvious in one are usually quite obscure in the other.