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I think the strongest evidence of this is functional vs imperative paradigms. It’s rare to find a functional programmer who didn’t have something like lisp or H

by jmole 5y ago

I think the strongest evidence of this is functional vs imperative paradigms. It’s rare to find a functional programmer who didn’t have something like lisp or Haskell as their first language.

emidln 5y ago
I've seen a lot of professional programmers pick up Clojure from varied backgrounds and come to write idiomatic functional Clojure. I don't actually know many people who use Clojure daily whose first language was a Lisp or an ML, everyone seems to learn Javascript, Python, or Java. Some of the older programmers learned assembler or C/C++ first. Clojure really encourages data-oriented programming, similar to what you often find in Python codebases. Mutation isn't the default in clojure for common data structures, so writing your iterative code is just more work than writing functional code using the immutable defaults. Language design has a big impact here. That's not to say you can't write imperative mutation heavy code in Clojure, but you're either going to fight the language or build up your own utility libraries to do it. It's there, but it's rarely idiomatic and often seen as a performance tradeoff.
aidenn0 5y ago
Lisp is arguably not much more functional than javascript; is JS a gateway to ML/Haskell?
- xf1cf 5y ago
  Arguably? By what metric? Lisp is a standard. What implementation?
- ska 5y ago
  Arguments trying to separate lisp from functional programming generally fall apart pretty quickly, notwithstanding common lisp in particular being multi-paradigmatic by design.
- username90 5y ago
  The Lisp that was popularly taught in school (Scheme) is mostly functional though. Functional doesn't mean that mutating state is impossible, just that it is discouraged.
ska 5y ago
I suspect that isn't true. I've met lots of people working in functional languages who didn't start there, including myself.
- kadoban 5y ago
  Another anecdote: me as well. I'm not sure I've ever actually known any programmer in general that started with a functional language, unless we want to count Javascript. I know they exist, but it can't be common.
drewcoo 5y ago
> It’s rare to find a functional programmer. FTFY My (crusty old) experience is that folks who did CS in college at schools that were more theory-driven tend to have experience with functional coding. I don't recall being taught Lisp but I do remember having to just figure it out for class. Because the class wasn't about teaching a language and there was homework in Lisp.

by jmole 5y ago

I think the strongest evidence of this is functional vs imperative paradigms. It’s rare to find a functional programmer who didn’t have something like lisp or Haskell as their first language.

emidln 5y ago

I've seen a lot of professional programmers pick up Clojure from varied backgrounds and come to write idiomatic functional Clojure. I don't actually know many people who use Clojure daily whose first language was a Lisp or an ML, everyone seems to learn Javascript, Python, or Java. Some of the older programmers learned assembler or C/C++ first. Clojure really encourages data-oriented programming, similar to what you often find in Python codebases. Mutation isn't the default in clojure for common data structures, so writing your iterative code is just more work than writing functional code using the immutable defaults. Language design has a big impact here. That's not to say you can't write imperative mutation heavy code in Clojure, but you're either going to fight the language or build up your own utility libraries to do it. It's there, but it's rarely idiomatic and often seen as a performance tradeoff.

aidenn0 5y ago

Lisp is arguably not much more functional than javascript; is JS a gateway to ML/Haskell?

xf1cf 5y ago
Arguably? By what metric? Lisp is a standard. What implementation?
ska 5y ago
Arguments trying to separate lisp from functional programming generally fall apart pretty quickly, notwithstanding common lisp in particular being multi-paradigmatic by design.
username90 5y ago
The Lisp that was popularly taught in school (Scheme) is mostly functional though. Functional doesn't mean that mutating state is impossible, just that it is discouraged.

ska 5y ago

I suspect that isn't true. I've met lots of people working in functional languages who didn't start there, including myself.

kadoban 5y ago
Another anecdote: me as well. I'm not sure I've ever actually known any programmer in general that started with a functional language, unless we want to count Javascript. I know they exist, but it can't be common.

drewcoo 5y ago

> It’s rare to find a functional programmer. FTFY My (crusty old) experience is that folks who did CS in college at schools that were more theory-driven tend to have experience with functional coding. I don't recall being taught Lisp but I do remember having to just figure it out for class. Because the class wasn't about teaching a language and there was homework in Lisp.