Francis Cianfrocca <garbagecat10 / gmail.com> writes:
> Steven Lumos wrote:
>
>> Turing machines derive from a model of a human working with pencil and
>> paper.  That's pretty fundamental.
>> 
>> Steve
>
> So then you would argue that imperative languages are fundamentally more 
> natural for people to program in than functional languages? 
> Notwithstanding that they are mathematically equivalent?
>
> I'm not an FP partisan myself so I won't argue with you, but I have a 
> feeling some Lisp and Ocaml fanboys are firing up their blowtorches for 
> you ;-)

I guess I'm probably to late to stop the flamewar, but I was merely
answering your question and not advocating from one side or the other.
I think FP is great! And to prove it, I'll quote someone had a
different experience from yours. ;-)

   We've had very little trouble getting non-Lisp programmers to read
   and understand and extend our Lisp code. The only real problem is
   that the training most programmers have in Lisp has taught them to
   code very inefficiently, without paying any attention to the
   compiler. Of course, with things like STL and Java, I think
   programmers of other languages are also becoming pretty ignorant.

   "Carl de Marcken: Inside Orbitz", http://paulgraham.com/carl.html

Steve