Imperative, declarative, functional, and... ???

Marc Clifton

Was wondering this morning what other programming paradigms there are (I'm putting OO into the imperative category.) For example, I think "asynchronous" might fit into this list, but what it really begs for is a definition of what this list actually is - I'm not happy with the word "paradigm". So, I have two questions - first, can you come up with a more concrete definition of this list, rather than just the word "paradigm", and what else do you think fits into this list? You could look at this post[^] but I don't think it contributed anything much to the actual question (though lots of good discussion on the 3 paradigms), and one person replied "Are there more exotic types? Not yet." Really? Not yet? Hmmm.... Marc

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Colin Mullikin

Marc Clifton wrote:

first, can you come up with a more concrete definition of this list, rather than just the word "paradigm", and what else do you think fits into this list?

Sounds like a homework question to me... ;P On a more serious note though, I agree about the word paradigm. It doesn't exactly fit the bill, but I don't really have a better suggestion at the moment...

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Mark_Wallace

Interrogative. Ve ask the qvestions.

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Marc Clifton

Colin Mullikin wrote:

Sounds like a homework question to me...

Yeah, I almost put in a disclaimer but figured, everyone should know me better than that! ;)

Colin Mullikin wrote:

but I don't really have a better suggestion at the moment...

Neither do I, that's why I figured I'd toss the question to the wolves and see what comes up. :) Marc

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Chris Meech

What would make another type, exotic? Seems like an attempt to promote something because of it's properties rather than it's usefullness. As far as another word for paradigm, it could be replaced with philosophy, dogma, religion(?). I'm too much of a practical programmer, so it's just another word that won't help solve things. Do people really look at a problem and decide what paradigm would best be used to solve it? :)

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gavindon

Chris Meech wrote:

Do people really look at a problem and decide what paradigm would best be used to solve it?

Probably not, but they might need to write something that sounds fancy for the boss :)

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megaadam

Oh there are many many more... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm[^] I for one have no quarrels with the word "paradigm". I think it is wise to remember that the paradigms cover different aspects (as well as properties) of a programming language. In other words paradigms are not necessarily mutually exclusive. (And BTW, there is no direct correlation between OO and imperative, according to the above link.)

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c2423

According to wikipedia OO should be considered as it's own paradigm, as should machine code and assembly language. It would depend on whether you want to class all of those as imperative or not. Technically they are, but is that really a useful definition? My thinking is that it depends what level of abstraction you want to consider: if you want to talk in the abstract it's hard to think of other major classes of language, but equally when describing the properties of a language by paradigm it's better to have more words than fewer, even if OO and procedural boil down to being imperative - I could say "C# is an imperative language, and so is machine code" but it's so abstract as to not give any useful information, whereas if I said "C# is an OO language, and machine code is an imperative language" then this at least starts to hint at the fundamental differences in how you would use both. And I don't particularly have a problem with the word paradigm in this context as to me it would imply a different way of thinking about how to structure the program, which taking OO vs structured programming as an example makes sense as, even though they are both still imperative, you think about their structure differently.

Marc Clifton

Mark Wallace wrote:

Interrogative.

Heh - there might actually be something there. ;) Marc

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Ennis Ray Lynch Jr

imperative, declarative, functional, scripting, and OO. At least that is from the list in 1301.

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Marc Clifton

Chris Meech wrote:

Do people really look at a problem and decide what paradigm would best be used to solve it?

Possibly, but I think what people mostly do is figure that out somewhat unconsciously. For example, if I need some sort of iteration that's not not provided by the framework, I might realize that I could generalize the iteration because I don't know what the next guy might want to do with each element, so I write a functional representation of the iteration that lets the programmer pass in a lambda expression, and I've just implemented a "functional paradigm" solution. Or I use an enumerable and a yield and I've implemented an imperative paradigm. Or I leverage an IoC framework to glue the handler to the iterator through an XML statement an lo, I have implemented a declarative paradigm. So, without really putting much thought into it, I end up with some implementation, and I'm going to contend that when we look at a problem, yes, we really should decide what paradigm would be best to solve it, we really should be more conscious about the decision process. Marc

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Marc Clifton

megaadam wrote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm[^]

:doh: Thanks! That was a case of my not seeing the forest for the trees. Marc

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Marc Clifton

c2423 wrote:

My thinking is that it depends what level of abstraction you want to consider:

Good points, all. I appreciate the feedback! Marc

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Marc Clifton

Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr. wrote:

imperative, declarative, functional, scripting, and OO.

Thanks! Marc

Reverse Engineering Legacy Applications
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Lost User

I really don't like adding OO to that list (as many suggest), because it's really just an extension to imperative programming (sometimes also used with functional) - an over-hyped way to organize imperative code that is the evolution of structured programming, or when used with functional, well, I don't even know what it's supposed to do in that case. If OO was a programming paradigm, then UML would be a programming language.

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Michael Bergman

Functional and imperative are the same thing. You only really do three things in programming. Ever. 1. Set a value. 2. Test a value. 3. Jump to an instruction that sets or tests a value. Noop doesn't count. I come from a lit background so I think in these terms: The declarative: this sets a value. It could be memory, registers, whatever. If you remember, back in the 1980's you would change what was on the monitor by simply writing directly to video memory using BASIC PUT. The inquisitive: this tests a value. If could be an if, for, or while statement. The imperative: go do something. Jump to another instruction. Everything is in the present tense. I've always kind of wondered how we could introduce the past and future tense into programming. To incorporate the past tense in to programming you would have to know the past states of objects to effectively use it. To incorporate the future tense you have to predict the states of objects. A past tense algorithm could help to predict trends of objects. Also, the modal verb "may" is interesting for statistical analysis. For example:

may i = 1;

Well, i may be 1, or it may not be one. Or...

may i = {1, 3, 5, 7, 9};

where i may be initialized to any of the values in the set. I think, if we also look at other language structures, we might come up compelling structures to use in describing algorithms. However, it still all comes back down to the basics of setting, testing, and jumping and you just can't get away from that.

m.bergman

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BobJanova

I agree with some other people that OO should be a separate category. Also, event-driven (or message based which is the same thing) is missing from your list.

TheGreatAndPowerfulOz

I think paradigm, while somewhat overused, is entirely appropriate. _paradigm: A typical example or pattern of something; a model_ Along with others, I would say OO is a separate paradigm and often uses the other paradigms. On the other hand, it's all machine, binary language in the end, so it's all different ways of expressing the same thing.

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Gary Wheeler

How about these: Pedantic: Standards it may implement, but work it may not. Aromatic: It may work, but there are these smells coming from the great steaming pile of source. Pragmatic: Ugly, but it works.

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