On Thursday, 19 March 2015 at 08:17:42 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
On Wed, 2015-03-18 at 13:27 +0000, CraigDillabaugh via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
[…]
There is quite possibly something too that, and as I imagine
with more functional experience it will come easier to me.
However, I still think imperative code is generally easier to
reason about because (usually) each line of code is performing
a single task, whereas with functional coding the goal seems
to be to cram as many operations as possible into a single line
(I know that isn't the real reason, it just seems that way at
times). Trying to 'unroll' everything in your head can be a
challenge. Throw in a lambda function or two with
the mess of braces/symbols and then you have a real puzzler.
Each imperative statement may (or may not) be easier to
understand,
but the problem is putting them together in combination. The
issue
here is creating chunks on which you put a label for reasoning
with.
Everything is about the abstractions you reason with. A person
who is
familiar only with C-style programming (as per OPs code
fragment) has
built up various abstractions, but they are nonetheless at a
very low
level and so many have to be combined.
Someone who has learned the internal iteration abstraction and
higher-
order functions is actually working at a higher level of
abstraction
and generally needs to combine fewer things to achieve the
overall
goal. Cramming operations on a line is nothing to do with the
abstractions, that is to do with some people playing code golf.
If you find yourself reading declarative style code and having
to
unroll to imperative equivalent to understand, it just means
you have
not yet internalized the declarative abstraction yet into your
mental
model and personal programming language.
There is a lot of work on all this sort of stuff in the
psychology of
programming research literature. We can speculate all we like
here
based on personal experience and anecdotal evidence, they do
experiments and have real data. Of course if you see any
experimenting
on first and second year undergraduates of computer science,
ignore
the results. I am talking about those who experiment with
practicing
programmers, people with real experience and expertise.
I just saw a talk of one of those studies.
One of the points was that curly braces languages lead to more
bugs than languages that follow the Algol more verbose style.
CodeMesh 2014 - Andreas Stefik - The Programming Language Wars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDZ-QSLQIB8
Quite interesting when one mixes psychology research with
language features, backed by validated research data.
--
Paulo
