It's funny to look at the history of computer science and to examine just how little we actually know about the field. I mean, sure, we have made crazy technological advancements in hardware design and raw performance of compute power, but we still do not actually know very much.

The sad part is, the world of academia¹ does not teach this. Instead, they teach the false illusion of how much we know and how we know so much more than those that preceded us. I recently read this quote (which is from a few years back in 2011):

Object-oriented programming is eliminated from the introductory curriculum, because it is both anti-modular and anti-parallel by its very nature, and hence unsuitable for our purposes.

Source: Robert Harper, Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University

: .source

Functional programming isn't new. It's been around since the 1950s.

Object oriented programming isn't new. It has also been around since the 1950s.

Can you take a guess how long parallel computing has been around? The 1960s…

The point is simply this: this stuff isn't new, we are just trying to figure out how to best apply our thinking and make machines do what we tell them to and really, only what we tell them do. I'll tell you a secret: we still do not know how to do this stuff. Yes, we can accomplish things, and sometimes great things. But at the end of the day, we do not have a lot of good answers to solve all of our problems, most of which have been around for nearly 70 years now.

I believe there is a fundamental reason why all of the paradigms (let's use the big three: imperative, object oriented, and functional) we have for coding break down in various problem spaces: we need all of them. If we instead thought of the problem space more like we do physical sciences, I think we can come to a better realization of this. Just as we need biology, physics, and mathematics we also need our imperative, object oriented, and functional programming paradigms. Each are a more natural fit for different problem domains, but when used together, provide a more holistic approach to our understanding of one another.

1. I'm perfectly aware that this is a broad generalization. This is based on my time there, my experience with others come out of there, and what I see main stream colleges teaching. It's really, really, sad when a PHD graduate comes into my office and struggles with writing basic code… but this is starting to digress a bit further than anticipated. ↩