[sakuronto]

I guess humans, being the temporal creatures we are, have an easier time debugging procedural programs because they have a "story", an expected sequence of "events" (calls, reassignments, etc.), that naturally goes with the program. Functional programming inherently obscures that.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Prolog on the other hand has a very clear imperative reading, that fits alongside the declarative one. In fact, this is probably one reason why many programmers used to imperative languages find it hard to pick up Prolog and run with it - they get distracted by the imperative reading.

On the other hand, that makes it much easier to debug code, by thinking along the lines of "p/2 is called after p/4" or even "p/2 returns A that is passed to p/4" (even though strictly speaking predicates don't "return" stuff).

[tabtab]

"Frogs might like go-to's": Joke from a heated debate about "go to" statements regarding whether go-to's are objectively bad, or it's matter of something in the human mind.

[chriswarbo]

I don't know if that's the case. It can certainly be tricky to "unlearn" this instinct when trying a language like Haskell after being immersed in imperative languages, but I'm not convinced that either is 'more natural' than the other.

For example, it's easy to forget how utterly baffled a learner can be when faced with:

    x = x + 1