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fiddlemath comments on Course recommendations for Friendliness researchers - Less Wrong Discussion
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How is the distinction between functional and imperative programming languages "not a real one"? I suppose you mean that there's a continuum of language designs between purely functional and purely imperative. And I've seen people argue that you can program functionally in python or emulate imperative programming in Haskell. Sure. That's all true. It doesn't change the fact that functional-style programming is manifestly more machine checkable in the average (and best) case.
Agreed. The most poorly programmed functional programs will be harder to machine check than the mostly skillfully designed imperative programs. But I think for typical programming scenarios or best case scenarios, functional-style programming makes it hands-down more natural to write the correct kind of structures that can be reliably machine checked and imperative programming languages just don't.
The entry level functional programming course is going to focus on all the right things: type theory, model theory, deep structure. The first imperative programming course at most universities is going to teach you how to leverage side-effects, leverage side-effects more, and generally design your code in a way that makes it less tractable for verification and validation later on.
"Not a real one" is sort of glib. Still, I think Jim's point stands.
The two words "functional" and "imperative" do mean different things. The problem is that, if you want to give a clean definition of either, you wind up talking about the "cultures" and "mindsets" of the programmers that use and design them, rather than actual features of the language. Which starts making sense, really, when you note "functional vs. imperative" is a perennial holy war, and that these terms have become the labels for sides in that war, rather than precise technical positions.
I mean, I am somewhat partisan in that war, and rather agree that, e.g., we should point new programmers to Scheme rather than Python or Java. But presenting "functional" vs. "imperative" as the major division in thinking about programming languages is epistemically dirty, when there's so many distinctions between languages that matter just as much, and describe things more precisely.
(Jim: fair rephrasing?)
I've wrote about the difference between imperative programs and functional ones (here, trying to explain why an imperative programmer might find functional programming difficult).
The main differences (do vs be, reversed order of reading, and heavy use of first class functions), make a quite sharp divide. Way sharper than other divides, such as "Object Oriented" versus the rest (though Alan Kay's original vision is probably more distinguishable than the current C++/Java vision).
Now when talking about programming an FAI, the most probable course of action will be to translate the math of FAI into a program. One thing I noticed about math formalism outside the specific field of computer programming, is that most formulations are either stateless, or explicit about state. When at some point we say
X = some long expression, we know it won't change until the end of the assignment. The math I know tend to be functional by default.