Re: (OT) Where is programming headed?

[AidanLee]

I would actually venture to say that this is very opposite of what I would consider Ivory-Tower-think. I don't know about other schools' curricula, but at the institution I recently graduated from, there was a course called Programming Languages. The whole point of this course was to introduce us to the 6 or so major programming paradigms (Functional, Procedural, Generic, OO, Declarative(?)... ok, so it's been a few years).

There was a little traffic on the Perl6 internals mailing list right after the Little Languages conference at MIT. While the focus was to clearly bring acadamia and real-world programming some mutual understanding, Around the edges there were brief, playfully pointed jokes mentioning ML and Scheme and the like.

That and my experiences at my own college suggest that the University you contacted was definitely the exception, not the rule, by limiting themselves to OO languages.

[impossiblerobot]

Although I have vague notions, I'm not entirely clear on all the terminology used to define different programming languages(functional, procedural, declarative, etc.).

Does anyone know of a web site with a good, detailed breakdown/comparison of all these different programming styles/paradigms?

Impossible Robot

[AidanLee]

Well, pulling open the book from that course I took, they give four categories: Imperative, Functional, Logic, and Object Oriented. I know my professor threw in Generic because of she was aware of developments in that category outside of C++'s templating system. I also know of a supplemental category, Aspect Oriented Programming, which is just recently being researched.

I find that the easiest way to get the sense of a programming category is to list examples of which languages fall where:

Object Oriented: Smalltalk
Functional: LISP, APL, ML, Haskell
Logic: Prolog
Imperative: C

[hding]

It's dangerous to make such lists, though. For example, nowadays Lisp (in the form of Common Lisp, at least), is probably used more to program in imperative and OO styles than functional. It just happens that you can reasonably do functional programming in it, and has somehow become pigeonholed as a functional language in some circles (when in fact there are probably better languages to use to really get into functional programming).

Of course, just about any language is subject to such stereotypes; just look at how many people regard Perl. :-)

[hakkr]

www.haskell.org
Will give you the down on Functional programming. Hope you like maths:)