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Don't make me laughDon't make me laughPosted Nov 22, 2011 17:32 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)In reply to: Don't make me laugh by nye Parent article: Interview with Andrew Tanenbaum (LinuxFr.org) It seems likely to me that prior exposure to mathematics, and prior experience of computer use (most user interfaces are effectively imperative), are comparably significant to what language is used for your first experience of computer programming.
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Don't make me laugh Posted Nov 22, 2011 18:07 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Hmm. I was a "math whiz" in grade school, but my first languages were BASIC, TI-BASIC, and C. Haskell ranks among my favorite languages today though. Using functional programming idioms in C++ and Python makes things much nicer there too, IMO.
I'd modify your hypothesis from "first experience of" to instead state "favorite languages for".
There are strong corellation... Posted Nov 22, 2011 21:27 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Most people who can understand math easily understand functional programming (they may not love it, but they understand it). But people who don't understand math usually just can not "get it". Sadly most programmers, not just most people fall in this category. Now, it does not mean you can build something for "monkeys" on top of functional language - you can. Problem with managed code is different.
There are strong corellation... Posted Nov 24, 2011 5:29 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
And then there's those of us who don't think that "buy new specialized" hardware is a real solution and develop large, complex, real-time apps for consumers' existing devices, and we are both knowledgable enough and skilled enough to recognize and capitalize on the very imperative nature of actual hardware. We can't stand functional languages, because they model academic nonsense rather than reality. Functional languages work great for little processing scripts or massively scalable data tranformation. They don't work at all for UIs (egads! state changes!) or anything that needs to eck out 60fps on 6 year old consumer-grade hardware.
The trick to being a _real_ programmer has nothing to do with being a functional programming guru or an imperative master or an OOP professor. It had to do with recognizing the right tool for the job and being able to implement maintainable, efficient, usable architectures on whatever that tool is.
Functional languages just aren't that tool in many cases.
There are strong corellation... Posted Nov 25, 2011 17:52 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Quite. Writing little bits of procedural programs in functional style remains useful, though, but it's rare that you can write anything substantial in that straitjacket.
There are strong corellation... Posted Nov 25, 2011 19:13 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
I like the GCC 'pure' and 'const' function attributes, and to try and get as much of the code as possible filed under such marked functions.
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