Comment by agumonkey
14 days ago
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.