We don’t know anything about programming!

Moore’s Law has hit a limit with processing power on single processor peaking and computing systems shipping with multiple cores. Functional programming is the hot new topic in industries dealing with massive scale in date or internet scale loads. Functional programming is better suited to handling side effects of concurrency and distributed computing when compared to Imperative programming models. The lack of adequate supports on the tools programming particularly in debugging and testing have slowed the advance of functional programming and its widely anticipated growth. However, I find that the bigger challenge is the developers struggling to come to grips with the functional programming paradigms. Most programs written in functional languages (at least initially) seem to be clones of their Imperative cousins. Perhaps the fault lies in the indoctrination of the programming community about a particular way of programming (in this case Imperative) as the Universal truth. I came across this great video about the Future of Programming by Bret Victor. 

In his inimitable style he introduces hot paradigms today i.e. Dynamic Programming, Functional Programming (Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style), Actor Model (embodied in Erlang, Akka), Massively Parallel Programming Array (FPGA). It does open your eyes to how many of these ‘hot’ paradigms have been around for so long. But the most compelling part of the talk was the last bit where he advocates keeping an open mind [1]“It's good to learn how to do something. It's better to learn many ways of doing something. But it's best to learn all these ways as suggestions or hints, not truth.” [2] “Learn tools, and use tools, but don't accept tools. Always distrust them; always be alert for alternative ways of thinking.” [3]“I don't know how to make a machine that builds a person out of a cell. But I think the problem is that we've been stuck for too long diddling with our details. We've been sitting here worrying about our type system, when we should be worrying about how to get flexible machines and flexible programming.”

Like Bret says – ‘do not be ignorant, but we need to be aware of the limitations and strengths of different programming paradigms, and be willing to explore flexible approaches to programming and not get stuck too long diddling with the details’

Parallelism from ‘Scratch’ 

A year ago, my son aged 8 started showing an interest in programming after we installed a desktop in his bedroom. He loves the Scratch Programing tools, a fabulous Interactive Programming Environment from MIT Labs (remember Grail from Bret’s talk) create stories, games, and animations. Condescendingly, I decided to teach him the ‘right way’ to learn programming. Normally when you are teaching programmers, they are happy if their programs can display some web pages and interact with a data store, but to say that children are demanding would be a massive understatement, They want their characters to fight dragons, morph into aliens, scream, jump, jump, spin, get new weapons, and have multiple lives… It is a chaotic ‘Omniverse’ which would stress the best of programmers. It was amazing to see him use concepts from parallel programming coordinating game characters using messages without the concept of shared state or threading to manage concurrency. It just reinforces Bret Victor’s advocacy of free thinking – children are not limited by particular paradigms and aided by the right (visual and interactive) tools can surprise you with the complexity of their programs. Imagine creating some of these games (which are so simple for a kid to ideate, create and program) in a mainstream programming environment.

His First Program