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25.03

This Criticism of SQL made me wince because of the author's unknowing cuts at functional programming:

"Many programmers, including me, often solve problems by envisioning how we would do it by hand, and then convert that to program code. I have yet to find a way to envision the above SQL as a straightforward physical task."

The funny thing, is from functional programmers you hear the exact opposite a lot; things like, "The code just states directly what it does, you don't have to mentally run it in order to figure things out."

I have a lot of trouble deciding who is right. It could be that humans are bad at abstract thought, but that doesn't make sense. It could be that imperative programmers are simply trained into thinking imperatively. It could be that individuals differ at a fundamental level in which style they prefer.

Whether humans in general should find functional programming more intuitive, I think people who can think functionally will always make better programmers regardless. Because programming is, at its essence, the task of reasoning about abstractions (information); that's why we're programmers and not engineers.