Programming Paradigms

Programming Paradigms (Lectures on High-performance Computing for Economists VII) 2024 Programming Approaches Paradigms I • A paradigm is the preferred approach to programming that a language supports. • Main paradigms in scientific computation (many others for other fields): 1. Imperative. 2. Structured. 3. Procedural. 4. Object-Oriented. 5. Functional. 1 Paradigms II • Multi-paradigm languages: C++, introduction a few years go of λ-calculus features. • Different problems are better suited to different paradigms. • You can always “speak” with an accent. • Idiomatic programming. 2 Imperative, structured, and procedural Imperative • Oldest approach. • Closest to the actual mechanical behavior of a computer⇒ original imperative languages were abstractions of assembly language. • A program is a list of instructions that change a memory state until the desired end state is achieved. • Useful for quite simple programs. • Difficult to scale. • Soon, it led to spaghetti code. 3 Structured • Go To Statement Considered Harmful • Structured program theorem (Böhm-Jacopini): sequencing, selection, and iteration are sufficient to express any computable function. • Hence, structured: subroutines/functions, block structures, and loops, and tests. • This is the paradigm you are likely to be most familiar with. 4 Procedural • Evolution of structured programming. • Divide the code into procedures: routines, subroutines, modules, methods, or functions. • Advantages: 1. Division of work. 2. Debugging and testing. 3. Maintenance. 4. Reusability. 5 OOP Object-oriented programming I • Predecesors in the late 1950s and 1960s in the LISP and Simula communities. • 1970s: Smalltalk from the Xerox PARC. • Large impact on software industry. • Complemented with other tools such as design patterns or UML. • Partial support in several languages: structures in C (and structs in older versions of Matlab). • Slower adoption in scientific and HPC. • But now even Fortran has OO support. 6 Object-oriented programming II • Object: a composition of nouns (numbers, strings, or variables) and verbs (functions). • Class: a definition of an object. • Analogy with functional analysis in math. • Object receives messages, processes data, and sends messages to other objects. 7 Object-orientated programming: basic properties • Encapsulation. • Inheritance. • Polymorphis. • Overloading. • Abstraction penalty. 8 Example in Matlab • Class household. • We create the file household.m. • We run Example Use Class.m. • Public, private, and protected properties and methods. 9 Functional Programming Functional programming • Nearly as old as imperative programming. • Created by John McCarthy with LISP (list processing) in the late 1950s. • Many important innovations that have been deeply influential. • Always admired in academia but with little practical use (except in Artificial Intelligence). 10 11 Theoretical foundation • Inspired by Alonzo Church’s λ-calculus from the 1930s. • Minimal construction of “abstractions” (functions) and substitutions (applications). • Lambda Calculus is Turing Complete: we can write a solution to any problem that a computer can solve. • John McCarthy is able to implement it in a practical way. • Robin Milner creates ML in the early 1970’ s. 12 Why functional programming? • Recent revival of interest. • Often functional programs are: 1. Easier to read. 2. Easier to debug and maintain. 3. Easier to parallelize. • Useful features: 1. Hindley–Milner type system. 2. Lazy evaluation. 3. Closures. 13 Main idea • All computations are implemented through functions: functions are first-class citizens. • Main building blocks: 1. Immutability: no variable gets changed (no side effects). In some sense, there are no variables. 2. Recursions. 3. Curried functions. 4. Higher-order functions: compositions (≃operators in functional analysis). 14 Interactions • How do we interact then? 1. Pure functional languages (like Haskell): only limited side changes allowed (for example, I/O) and tightly enforced to prevent leakage. 2. Impure functional languages (like OCalm or F#): side changes are allowed at the discretion of the programmer. • Loops get substituted by recursion. • We can implement many insights from functional programming even in standard languages such as C++ or Matlab. 15 Functional languages • Main languages: 1. Mathematica. 2. Common Lisp/Scheme/Clojure. 3. Standard ML/Calm/OCalm/F#. 4. Haskell. 5. Erlang/Elixir. 6. Scala. 16