GCC and static analysis [LWN.net]

GCC and static analysis

Posted May 17, 2012 15:50 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576)
In reply to: GCC and static analysis by khim
Parent article: GCC and static analysis

>I only remember the key result: people who groked functional programming were able to program imperatively (I can not recall even a single person who was able to succeed with functional programming but had trouble with imperative one - this probably happens, but it's extremely rare)

That's interesting - not particularly surprising but it still makes me feel weird.

When I started my CS course (about a decade ago) we started with Scheme, which I found simple and intuitive. It took me quite a while to get used to imperative programming (in C and Ada) after that - it felt very unnatural and I didn't really feel like I understood what I was doing, more like shooting in the dark.

Later we had a couple of courses using Prolog, and I *never* managed to grok that programming style, so I find it easy to believe that some people are intrinsically more inclined towards one programming style versus another.

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GCC and static analysis

Posted May 20, 2012 21:49 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> Later we had a couple of courses using Prolog, and I *never* managed to grok that programming style, so I find it easy to believe that some people are intrinsically more inclined towards one programming style versus another.

It took until the last weekend of a two week project for things to "click" with Prolog. My experience tells me that half of Prolog programming is knowing where to stick '!' in between your statements. Of course, my imperative skills were a little "broken" after that project, but I'm glad I got to work with Prolog even though I don't use it for anything today.