but then as soon as you try to write your first program you run headlong into the fact that programming is nothing like other tasks you have done before. The tricks you have to learn to make imperative programming work are not really any easier than the tricks for other paradigms.
There you go again, equating good and natural.
It seems like even functional decomposition can be unnatural for people even given the commonness of "one big loop" mega-functions as the solution created by a lot of contractors.
Certainly, the problems of mud ball and simple imperative programming styles is that they get harder as you go along.
Indeed, programming methodologies are more or less unnatural ways to program that allow programmers to be more productive and programs to scale in compensation for that unnaturalness.
Consider that mathematicians among the general public, pre-computers, were actually far more rare than functional programmers among programmers. Mathematics is also an unnatural construction. I grew having a great deal of difficulty with handwriting before computers appeared and I learned to love math shortcuts for the writing they saved me. But I also learned most people are more mentally lazy than physically lazy and on average would rather do more work than learn a new thing.
There you go again, equating good and natural.
It seems like even functional decomposition can be unnatural for people even given the commonness of "one big loop" mega-functions as the solution created by a lot of contractors.
Certainly, the problems of mud ball and simple imperative programming styles is that they get harder as you go along.
Indeed, programming methodologies are more or less unnatural ways to program that allow programmers to be more productive and programs to scale in compensation for that unnaturalness.
Consider that mathematicians among the general public, pre-computers, were actually far more rare than functional programmers among programmers. Mathematics is also an unnatural construction. I grew having a great deal of difficulty with handwriting before computers appeared and I learned to love math shortcuts for the writing they saved me. But I also learned most people are more mentally lazy than physically lazy and on average would rather do more work than learn a new thing.