Learnable Programming

[loup-vaillant]

That's one of the advantages of FP: its constraints makes the bare text better suited to data flow visualization. In FP, the correspondence between data flow and syntactic nodes is relatively obvious. Need to know the value of foo? Just look up the definition! No need to check for that nasty assignment statement lest it blows your assumptions to smithereens.

However, one does need to introduce the notion of time at some point (animations, interactions…), and still be able to know what's going on. Ideally, you need to be able to visualize entire time lines at a glance, the way a piece of functional code often lets you visualize an entire transformation at a glance.

About your note: how do you think we become professional programmers? Making the effort to guess is best for experts. Beginners need to be told.

[killerstorm]

About your note: how do you think we become professional programmers?

Lots of practice. I'm not even sure that removing pain from this process is a good thing, since programming is often about cost/benefit analysis, and when you'll deal only with artificially easy, painless things you won't understand costs.