[dawnofdusk]

The author of this blog is clearly eloquent and, as per their interspersed quotations of David Hume and others, it is refreshing to see someone so well-read in the software/tech blogosphere.

I love Lisp. The last few paragraphs are a pretty good description. It's nice to have a very flexible set of tools, instead of being forced to conform to object-oriented design or whatever paradigm. IMO the only legitimate reason in sticking steadfast to a design paradigm is for performance reasons, but of course this can only really justify array programming/imperative programming. But at the point where you want some flexible abstractions, it's nice to have the power to do introspection, delayed evaluation, and so on. Disclaimer: my background is physics/math, so function abstractions are much more intuitive to me than objects, or whatever other structures are taught to CS students.

[kazinator]

The author may be eloquent, but unfortunately calls imperative operators, like while, "functions".

[layer8]

Imperative code is a function from one program state to another.

[kazinator]

That concept is not reified in the imperative language in any meaningful way. There is no actual function from the program state, to the next state as a language construct. Even if there were, it would be in a different category from the while loop and its ilk.