Paradigms

Topics

Pages

• Comparing
• Declarative programming
• Functional Programming
• Imperative Programming
• Logic programming
• Mixed Functional and Object-Orientated
• Object-Oriented Programming
• Procedural programming

Content

Uncategorized Links

• Programming language
  • Page on the Simple English Wikipedia - see the Types of programming languages section

In this section of pages, I cover definitions of paradigms and links to learn more. For some areas I also cover languages that focus on enable that paradigm.

There over 200 programming languages, so I wouldn’t cover them all here.

Paradigms constrain what you can do with a language and gives it focus. The early languages could be used for anything this lack of structure makes it harder.

Overview

The info below is based on Comparison of Programming Paradigms page on Wikipedia, which uses the “approaches” and “paradigms” groupings.

Approaches

There are two main approaches to programming:

• Imperative Programming – focuses on how to execute, defines control flow as statements that change a program state.
• Declarative Programming – focuses on what to execute, defines program logic, but not detailed control flow.

Paradigms

The following are widely considered the main programming paradigms, as seen when measuring programming language popularity. These are light comparisons.

From Comparison of Programming Paradigms on Wikipedia.

• Procedural Programming - Specifies the steps a program must take to reach a desired state.
• Functional Programming - Treats programs as evaluating mathematical functions. Avoids state and mutable data.
• Object-Oriented Programming - Organizes programs as objects: data structures consisting of datafields and methods together with their interactions.

These are tools you can use. And you can take learnings from both and apply them, for example avoiding side-effects is a good idea in any of them.

From Programming Paradigm on Wikipedia.

Programming paradigms are a way to classify programming languages based on their features. Languages can be classified into multiple paradigms.

Approaches and paradigms

Here is how the Programming Paradigm article on Wikipedia classifies paradigms within approaches.

Common programming paradigms include:

• imperative in which the programmer instructs the machine how to change its state,
  • procedural which groups instructions into procedures,
  • object-oriented which groups instructions with the part of the state they operate on,
• declarative in which the programmer merely declares properties of the desired result, but not how to compute it
  • functional in which the desired result is declared as the value of a series of function applications,
  • logic in which the desired result is declared as the answer to a question about a system of facts and rules,
  • mathematical in which the desired result is declared as the solution of an optimization problem
  • reactive in which the desired result is declared with data streams and the propagation of change

Another comparison, based on YouTube video:

Approach	Paradigm	Description
Imperative	Procedural	The default style.
Mixed	Procedural + Functional	Minimize state.
Imperative	OOP	Segregate state.
Mixed	OOP + Functional	Minimize and segregate state. See Mix FP and OOP page for more info.