| Re: Survey: What led you to functional programming? |
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Group: comp.lang.functional · Group Profile
Author: Arved SandstromArved Sandstrom Date: Sep 20, 2008 00:22
"Benjamin L. Russell" Yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:ors6d4h51in0cgnhl011bi8bfft5a1o3do@4ax.com...> The thought has just occurred to me that conducting a public survey on
> evolution across, familiarity with, and exposure to various
> programming paradigms in students and practitioners of functional
> programming could be illuminating in revealing the correlation between
> degree of familiarity with and experience in
> procedural/object-oriented programming paradigms, and ease of learning
> functional programming in a non-strict, purely functional programming
> language, such as Haskell or Clean.
>
> Could you please outline your evolution as a functional programmer in
> the following manner (preferably in this thread):
A) Chronological evolution in programming languages:
Roughly:
mid/late-'70's through early '80's: FORTRAN IV/77, VAX Assembler
'82-'82: C64 BASIC, 6502 machine language (the good 'ol HEXMON cartridge)
mid/late-'80's: BASICA, C, Pascal
~1990: C++
1992: Perl, awk/nawk/gawk
1993: Prograph (first exposure to decent OOP)
mid-90's: neat stuff that would run on Mac, like Oberon, some SQL
1997: Java
late '90's: Python, serious intro to SQL, XSLT
last 4-5 years: neat languages - Prolog, LISP, Haskell, F#, OCaml, J, Erlang
last 2-3 years: C#, Ruby
B) Relevant comments:
1. Exposure to languages tracks first introduction in school, then some
dabbling, then scientific programming, then business programming + ongoing
dabbling;
2. I haven't found any of the base paradigms (procedural, object-oriented,
logic, functional, function-level) innately difficult to pick up. What _is_
challenging is learning the idioms of one family when being immersed mostly
in the idioms of another.
AHS
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