Friday, July 17, 2009 10:43 AM
by
RickM
Every Paradigm Has its Place
Michael Feathers, author of the excellent book Working Effectively with Legacy Code, recently tweeted about a paper written by Peter Van Roy entitled Programming Paradigms for Dummies: What Every Programmer Should Know. I thoroughly enjoyed the paper, despite being initially put off by its title. It’s written in very accessible language and the vast majority of programmers would benefit greatly from giving it a read.
Understandably, most won’t take the time to read a 50-odd page academic paper unprompted. We are all busy professionals with full lives. With this in mind, I would like to share the core of the ideas contained therein. Perhaps this short summary might intrigue in so far as to incite the printing of said paper for placement by the bed side, or in the bathroom, for future perusal.
What Every Programmer Should Know
What exactly constitutes a paradigm? In this paper Peter Van Roy provides the following definition:
“A programming paradigm is an approach to programming a computer based on a mathematical theory or a coherent set of principles.”
This concept along with Imperative, Object Oriented and even Functional programming are spoken of in many software development circles. However, little known to the every day software engineer is the family tree of paradigms which has continuously been evolving since the advent of computing. Each paradigm having been invented to reduce the complexity of solving a particular computational problem.
The basic idea of this paper is that, as Software Engineers, we should take the time to learn paradigms outside the scope of those had in mind by our language’s designers. Because most languages directly support only one or two paradigms, problems are frequently solved in needlessly computationally expensive, convoluted and difficult to maintain ways.
Therefore, the best approach language community leaders can take is to learn, retrofit our existing languages and promote knowledge of these paradigms. In this way we can enjoy many of their benefits and start solving problems in the most manageable way available.
Additional Thoughts on The Ideal Multi-Paradigm Language
In the ideal case, a language would directly support all known paradigms well. However, even given the realization of this currently unrealistic language, it would take a long time to see widespread adoption. As time passed and the language was adopted, surely new paradigms would be invented and the language would be no longer “paradigm complete”. Thus the process would likely have to be repeated ad infinitum.
This is not to say the trying to build such a language would not be worthwhile. Perhaps even some kind of paradigm meta layer could be made to enhance extensibility. However, I do believe that with any language it would only be a matter of time before a paradigm was invented that violated an underlying assumption of the system, and the processes would need to be restarted from scratch.