On Feb 22, 8:35 pm, Jonathan Gardner <jgard...@jonathangardner.net> wrote: > 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. >
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. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list