On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 12:31 PM, John Bokma <j...@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. -- Jonathan Gardner jgard...@jonathangardner.net -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
