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Comment on Puzzle Languages (2009)parent

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It turns out that if your main paradigm is X then writing a solution in paradigm Y is a puzzle, as you have to convert things in your head from a natural representation to a different one. Writing performant C++ has genuinely become somewhat difficult after working in a semi-pure manner for a long time, despite C++ being my first and main language.

It turns out that if your main paradigm is X then writing a solution in paradigm Y is a puzzle

Exactly. The entire blog post is a long way to say 'I am accostomed to think in C-derived languages'.

Of course a new language paradigm will be a puzzle, it takes a while for our brains to change/match the new paradigm.

The 'puzzle' aspect of the language isn't necessarily permanent.

Perhaps, but there are languages that obviously differ from the "general" paradigm, such as stack programming. I guess if you only ever do stack programming, "stack programming" is just programming, but obviously stands out over all languages.

The article distinguishes between prog-lang specific puzzles and "programming in general is a puzzle", but without a universal paradigm it's not clear what that is - for example, stateless functional programming might be a puzzle, but the "norm" requires memory/state management as a puzzle; imperative/declarative is the same - which imperative is the norm, it's not clear to me it's less of a puzzle to have to explicitly think about sequence and state change.

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