Interesting talk on Python vs. Ruby and how he would like Python to have just a bit more syntactic flexibility.

[Steve Howell]

On Feb 22, 9:11 pm, Steve Howell <showel... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Feb 22, 8:35 pm, Jonathan Gardner <jgard... at jonathangardner.net>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 12:31 PM, John Bokma <j... at castleamber.com> wrote:
>
> > > In my class there where basically 2 groups of people: the ones who got
> > > functional programming and the ones who had a hard time with it. The
> > > latter group consisted mostly of people who had been programming in
> > > languages like C and Pascal for years; they had a hard time thinking
> > > functionally. The former group consisted mostly of people who had little
> > > or no programming experience, with a few exceptions (including me :-) ).
>
> > > So I have the feeling it has more to do with your background then how
> > > people think / are wired.
>
> > That's encouraging. If functional programming is really more natural
> > to those who are less familiar with math and programming, then perhaps
> > there is a future for it.
>
> > Unfortunately, I don't know that just knowing how to program
> > functionally is enough. Even the functional folks have a hard time
> > optimizing routines (time or memory). Even with DBAs, they have to
> > know how the functional SQL query is translated into discrete machine
> > instructions.
>
> > As it is now, the vast majority (all?) of the programmers who do any
> > programming seriously are familiar with the statement-based approach.
> > A minority understand let alone appreciate the functional approach.
>
> Hi Jonathon.  I understand three major programming paradigms--
> imperative, OO, and functional.  My first instinct is always
> imperative, as I just want the computer to *do* stuff.
>
> I am not an expert in any paradigm and it is possible that I am
> overlooking other major paradigms.
>
> My gut instinct is that functional programming works well for lots of
> medium sized problems and it is worth learning.

Sorry for misspelling your name, and yes I agree that you always want
some notion of what happens under the covers (in any paradigm).