Comment by trealira
14 days ago
Imperative programming is probably the most intuitive, but I'm doubtful curly braces and C-like syntax are anything more than coincidence. The first programming language was Fortran, and it didn't look anything like C. This is a really old Fortran program copied from a book:
WRITE(6,28)
READ(5,31) LIMIT
ALIM = LIMIT
5 SUM=0.0
DO 35 ICNT=1,LIMIT
READ(5,32) X
35 SUM = SUM + X
AMEAN = SUM/ALIM
WRITE(6,33) AMEAN
GO TO 5
28 FORMAT(1H1)
31 FORMAT(I3)
32 FORMAT(F5.2)
33 FORMAT(8H MEAN = .F8.2)
END
Most modern programming languages seem to take inspiration from C, which took inspiration from BCPL, and that from Algol. Others took inspiration from Algol directly, like Ada, or Lua. And Python has indentation-based block structure, rather than having blocks of statements delimited by braces or or an "end" keyword.
I always liked Pascal's BEGIN and END statements instead of curly braces. There is also Basic where the blocks built into control flow statements, like FOR I=1 TO 5 [code here] NEXT I
I'd argue a lot of programming language evolution is influenced by the capabilities of our IDEs. When you code in a text editor, the terse syntax of C is great and brings advantages over the verbosity of Pascal, Basic or god forbid Cobol. Once your editor does auto-indentation the braces seem redundant and you get Python. Smart completions from IntelliSense are essential to efficiently writing C#, and now that LSP has brought that to every IDE or smart text editor we have the explosion of popularity of more explicit and more powerful type systems (Typescript, typed Python, Rust). Programming languages are shaped by their environment, but the successful ones far outlive the environment that shaped them.
It really depends on your mindset. I grew up with math (composable operators, no side effects) and a lot of immutable + virtual operations software (maya, samplitude, shake, combustion) ... so to me imperative programming, with all the control flow, subtly changing state and time dependencies, coupling of concerns was almost instantaneously an fatal issue..
Backus also shifted away from imperative inspired languages to design FP/FL language (I thought they were contemporaries of BCPL but came 10 years later, later than APL), even though he contributed to FORTRAN directly.
You know, you're probably right. It's just been so long since I was introduced to programming languages that I had almost forgotten (though I'm probably younger than you).
I remember learning JavaScript as a kid (for some class) and trying to get used to the mutable variables, having to mutter to myself "Okay, here, let x be 4. After this line, x is x + 1, which is 5, a new value." From there, eventually thinking things like: "After every loop, x changes to be itself plus 1. So after the loop, x will be its value before the loop plus however many times the loop ran." Things like that. Basically informal Hoare logic without realizing it.
I had almost forgotten, because I then went years before I programmed again, and the language I learned was C, which was probably easier because I was already familiar with while loops and mutable variables.
Maybe it would have been equally intuitive to learn a functional language first. It's probably no more intuitive to mutter that under your breath versus stuff about the type system and equational reasoning.
On the other hand, it seems easier to get beginners interested in programming with an imperative approach. In our assignments in that class using JavaScript, we used libraries to make little games, which imperative programming seems better-suited for.