> [Anthropomorphism] is paralyzing in the sense that, because persons exist and act in time, its adoption effectively prevents a departure from operational semantics and thus forces people to think about programs in terms of computational behaviours, based on an underlying computational model. This is bad, because operational reasoning is a tremendous waste of mental effort.

I see the effects of this every day at work. And the resulting programs are indeed much complicated by needless uses of procedural style.

It appears most programmers are completely oblivious to the fact that most computation is completely timeless. It's pure functions. It's static. Just like good old fashioned Math™. Nevertheless, they go on introducing time, change, and all the complexities and errors that goes with them, just because nobody taught them to think any better.

It is quite infuriating that I am sometimes forced to follow that trend, sometimes because otherwise my colleagues wouldn't understand my code, but more often because the APIs they wrote are based on mutation when there was no need, or their functions aren't total even though they could have been.