Just continued reading the discussion on the newsgroup from yesterday, and came across arguments in favor of procedurales languages. Most probably we will need a mix between functional and imperative programming. Also, I have heard somewhere the argument that structure and function never answer the same sort of questions. We always need a mix between both, as Wittgenstein seems not have accepted.
From the newsgroup:
R. Crawford, Sa 15 Mai 1993:
"I also disagree that procedural languages were the byproduct of the von Neumann
architecture. I claim that the procedural model is the more natural one for specifying any sort of process and would have been dominant even if we were programming on Turing machines. When you give someone directions to a nearby address, you state it procedurally. Turn left here. Stop. Turn right there.
Stop. When you instruct someone in the preparation of food, you state the recipe procedurally, not recursively. I think a better case may be made for the inevitability of procedural specifications than functional ones. "
(when specifying the change of a location, an algorithm could indeed be taken as sequence of directions to follow, and checks to make whether arrived. That is our "natural" way of transferring the meaning of an adress today. On the other hand when we want to know more about the place, we ask by using recursion "is it the place that .... of that ... ?)
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