The author of this blog is clearly eloquent and, as per their interspersed quotations of David Hume and others, it is refreshing to see someone so well-read in the software/tech blogosphere.
I love Lisp. The last few paragraphs are a pretty good description. It's nice to have a very flexible set of tools, instead of being forced to conform to object-oriented design or whatever paradigm. IMO the only legitimate reason in sticking steadfast to a design paradigm is for performance reasons, but of course this can only really justify array programming/imperative programming. But at the point where you want some flexible abstractions, it's nice to have the power to do introspection, delayed evaluation, and so on. Disclaimer: my background is physics/math, so function abstractions are much more intuitive to me than objects, or whatever other structures are taught to CS students.
That concept is not reified in the imperative language in any meaningful way. There is no actual function from the program state, to the next state as a language construct. Even if there were, it would be in a different category from the while loop and its ilk.
Comments
The author of this blog is clearly eloquent and, as per their interspersed quotations of David Hume and others, it is refreshing to see someone so well-read in the software/tech blogosphere.
I love Lisp. The last few paragraphs are a pretty good description. It's nice to have a very flexible set of tools, instead of being forced to conform to object-oriented design or whatever paradigm. IMO the only legitimate reason in sticking steadfast to a design paradigm is for performance reasons, but of course this can only really justify array programming/imperative programming. But at the point where you want some flexible abstractions, it's nice to have the power to do introspection, delayed evaluation, and so on. Disclaimer: my background is physics/math, so function abstractions are much more intuitive to me than objects, or whatever other structures are taught to CS students.
The author may be eloquent, but unfortunately calls imperative operators, like while, "functions".
Imperative code is a function from one program state to another.
That concept is not reified in the imperative language in any meaningful way. There is no actual function from the program state, to the next state as a language construct. Even if there were, it would be in a different category from the while loop and its ilk.