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Your hard-line stance is a little bit too far IMHO. That inanimate matter programming is all about manipulating also has no notion of objects or object orientat

Your hard-line stance is a little bit too far IMHO. That inanimate matter programming is all about manipulating also has no notion of objects or object orientation... or (for the most part) methods, fields, functions, procedures, arrays, modules, encapsulation, interfaces, garbage collection, databases ... and so on and so on. All that abstraction exists to make programming easier for humans to grok, and for teams to deliver some "useful work". To borrow from Robin Milner, who worked on ML: "Types are the leaven of computer programming; they make it digestible." All that abstraction makes programming more digestible, or more palatable. Functional programming is just some more abstraction to make it more digestible. To say that it's a redefinition of programming is just a distraction, since programming has already been redefined. Also, you're right that CS isn't programming, and viewed in a certain light one could argue CS is basically just a branch of math. But on the other hand, programming without CS really wouldn't be that useful. It's just not a helpful distinction to make in this way.

guard-of-terra 14y ago
I would argue that objects, methods, fields, modules, encapsulation, interfaces, garbage collection, databases are not the basics of programming either. Good things to have, but are not basics of programming. So, teach/learn them later in the cycle. Basics of programming are variables, branches, arrays, loops and simple I/O. You can go a long way with these. And you can explain those to 6 yr old child.
- kamaal 14y ago
  They go a long way for kids. The inventors of C++, Java, Perl, Python, Erlang are trying to solve problems basic to many other domains. So it depends on what you define as basic. What you seem to define are pre requisite to start learning basics.
- spacemanaki 14y ago
  If we were talking about teaching programming to kids, I actually agree with you. It wasn't clear from the top-level comment that started this thread if that's what we were talking about though. I thought that we were talking about intro to CS for freshmen in college. That's where I think it might be valuable to start with functional programming. Note: might -- I really don't know.
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    "People should be required to learn the basics of programming first. They should start with immutable data objects" We weren't talking about freshmen in college. And talking about freshmen in college is not so interesting because they agreed to listen to bullshit (information of questionable utility) by joining college. It's much more interesting to talk about kids or adults because they have the choice.
- nessus42 14y ago
  > And you can explain those to 6 yr old child. The most popular programming language for teaching children is Logo, a FUNCTIONAL programming language!
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    I can't comment on this since I've never seen Logo in the wild. I know people who did and they never learned how to program.
    - nessus42 14y ago
      Here's Logo in the wild: http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/ It's used to do all sorts of interesting things, including real economic modeling. I.e., I've seen it used by real economists. When I first saw NetLogo being used by an economist to demonstrate an economic model, I thought it strange that the NetLogo people had re-used the name "Logo", a kid's programming language, for something that is a serious tool used by professional researchers. It took me a while to figure out that it is the same Logo! And those kids, I guess, grew up, and decided to do something real with it. R is also a functional programming language used to do very real work.
- prodigal_erik 14y ago
  Recursion is fundamental. Reassigning to a bunch of variables in a loop is a poor imitation of recursion that caught on because fifty years ago we could barely afford call stacks and hadn't invented tail call optimization. The better our hardware and our theory gets, the more of these shortcuts we can and should leave behind, so that we no longer need to try to preserve the illusion that programs run sequentially and state is globally consistent.
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    It's not an illusion, it's in the CPU. It didn't happen yet, call me again when it will.
    - nessus42 14y ago
      Everything we do in any high level programming languages is an illusion. In fact, even assembly language is an illusion. The only thing that isn't an illusion is building a computer out of nand gates, and the like. In my education, we STARTED with functional programming, and eventually we built real microcoded computers that we designed ourselves out of nand gates and adder chips. And, yes, I mean REAL chips with lots and lots of wires on a real physical breadboard. Is a nand gate, the fundamental building block of all computers, is that functional? You bet your ass it is! State only comes by using this functional component and feedback to make a flip-flop. Your premises are all wrong: My education started with FUNCTIONAL programming. We then learned how to build OO on top of functional programming, using only closures and single mutation operation: variable rebinding. We then went on to design and build our own physical computers out of chips and wires, starting with the fundamental functional component: a nand gate.
      - guard-of-terra 14y ago
        You do not program nand gates. You program your cpu. Last time I've checked, it's not Reduceron II but instead AMD64 or ARM cpu. One which is inherently imperative - it's von neumann machine. It has registers, shared writable memory and stuff.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

guard-of-terra 14y ago

I would argue that objects, methods, fields, modules, encapsulation, interfaces, garbage collection, databases are not the basics of programming either. Good things to have, but are not basics of programming. So, teach/learn them later in the cycle. Basics of programming are variables, branches, arrays, loops and simple I/O. You can go a long way with these. And you can explain those to 6 yr old child.

kamaal 14y ago
They go a long way for kids. The inventors of C++, Java, Perl, Python, Erlang are trying to solve problems basic to many other domains. So it depends on what you define as basic. What you seem to define are pre requisite to start learning basics.
spacemanaki 14y ago
If we were talking about teaching programming to kids, I actually agree with you. It wasn't clear from the top-level comment that started this thread if that's what we were talking about though. I thought that we were talking about intro to CS for freshmen in college. That's where I think it might be valuable to start with functional programming. Note: might -- I really don't know.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  "People should be required to learn the basics of programming first. They should start with immutable data objects" We weren't talking about freshmen in college. And talking about freshmen in college is not so interesting because they agreed to listen to bullshit (information of questionable utility) by joining college. It's much more interesting to talk about kids or adults because they have the choice.
nessus42 14y ago
> And you can explain those to 6 yr old child. The most popular programming language for teaching children is Logo, a FUNCTIONAL programming language!
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  I can't comment on this since I've never seen Logo in the wild. I know people who did and they never learned how to program.
  - nessus42 14y ago
    Here's Logo in the wild: http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/ It's used to do all sorts of interesting things, including real economic modeling. I.e., I've seen it used by real economists. When I first saw NetLogo being used by an economist to demonstrate an economic model, I thought it strange that the NetLogo people had re-used the name "Logo", a kid's programming language, for something that is a serious tool used by professional researchers. It took me a while to figure out that it is the same Logo! And those kids, I guess, grew up, and decided to do something real with it. R is also a functional programming language used to do very real work.
prodigal_erik 14y ago
Recursion is fundamental. Reassigning to a bunch of variables in a loop is a poor imitation of recursion that caught on because fifty years ago we could barely afford call stacks and hadn't invented tail call optimization. The better our hardware and our theory gets, the more of these shortcuts we can and should leave behind, so that we no longer need to try to preserve the illusion that programs run sequentially and state is globally consistent.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  It's not an illusion, it's in the CPU. It didn't happen yet, call me again when it will.
  - nessus42 14y ago
    Everything we do in any high level programming languages is an illusion. In fact, even assembly language is an illusion. The only thing that isn't an illusion is building a computer out of nand gates, and the like. In my education, we STARTED with functional programming, and eventually we built real microcoded computers that we designed ourselves out of nand gates and adder chips. And, yes, I mean REAL chips with lots and lots of wires on a real physical breadboard. Is a nand gate, the fundamental building block of all computers, is that functional? You bet your ass it is! State only comes by using this functional component and feedback to make a flip-flop. Your premises are all wrong: My education started with FUNCTIONAL programming. We then learned how to build OO on top of functional programming, using only closures and single mutation operation: variable rebinding. We then went on to design and build our own physical computers out of chips and wires, starting with the fundamental functional component: a nand gate.
    - guard-of-terra 14y ago
      You do not program nand gates. You program your cpu. Last time I've checked, it's not Reduceron II but instead AMD64 or ARM cpu. One which is inherently imperative - it's von neumann machine. It has registers, shared writable memory and stuff.
deleted 14y ago
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