>This is a very strong claim. "Any human" includes even the smallest children. "Nobody" precludes any one. All we have to do to prove your claim false is to find a single human who won't do as you said, which is trivial. I've already identified one: small humans whose brains haven't developed enough to comprehend ordered instructions.

It is a strong claim and I stand by it. In your mind you feel as if you identified a counter example. I plainly already told you that it is NOT the case.

First off lisp like languages are by default geared toward an FP style. Documentation and syntax makes it easier to do the FP style over imperative. The language you chose has clear bias towards the FP style.

Additionally. Nothing stops people from doing python in the FP style. Python is very amenable to that. One could make the argument, according to your flawed logic, that with list comprehensions, reduce and recursion one should, if you're theory is correct automatically do FP when using the the python language.(I didn't choose this example earlier because it suffers from the same problem as logo, there is a clear bias towards imperative that's intrinsic to the language)

But this doesn't occur. People choose the paradigm that fits them better. Imperative.

Those kids may understand FP programming. They may be able to learn logo. But that doesn't mean that the imperative style would've been easier and more natural.

>Moreover, it's leading. You start with "I have several tasks" (which sounds like a list), and you want them written down (okay, so you want someone to write the list you just told them).

This is you illustrating my point. I have 5 things, I have 2 tasks, I have several things, I have several tasks. None of these things explicitly point to procedures that have to be in order. It's simply your natural bias. If I say write something down but I don't say write it down in a single sentence or write it down as a numbered list, your bias automatically inserts imperatives in there. The language itself is neutral, but your natural tendency to insert additional meaning into the sentence is proof of my point.

>I must state again that I'm not defending or referencing functional programming in any of my replies. I started with a reference to Excel, and have also mentioned Etoys and Logo. None of these are considered strictly functional. When I mentioned temporal programming, that's another paradigm entirely separate from functional and imperative.

Understood. My point here is just saying that the additional "features" you mentioned aren't exclusive to the declarative paradigm because the declarative paradigm is actually a restrictive style. Imperative programming has more features and more freedom then functional programming but that doesn't necessarily make it better.

>This is a very indirect way of expressing time. The only thing that needs to mutate for time to pass is the timer. In the imperative model, the world is stopped until the next statement is executed. This is to match the paradigm to the computing hardware, not to the real world as you keep insisting.

No. This is the most natural way. For most of human civilization mathematics did not exist. The concept of time as a symbolic measurement did not exist. People measured time through change. When you take symbols and language and strip it down to our base perceptions, time is mutation, time is change. It is the most primitive and fundamental measurement of time.

Again your bias with what you know (timers) influences your view here.

>Okay, if you say so. You literally don't have a single study backing this up. The only argument you've offered is "it's obvious", which I assure you, it's not. If it's only obvious to you, then maybe all you're arguing is that you innately understand c-style syntax. Which, sure. But that isn't generalizable to "every human", as you are literally claiming.

Why do we need studies for everything? It's like I can't have thoughts or strong opinions on everything if there's not some scientific study backing it up? I strongly believe that you are human. Do I need a study to prove such an obvious point? Science is just the definitive data driven way at arriving at an accurate conclusion. The downfall is that it's slow and expensive. You can arrive at similar conclusions using less accurate pathways like logic and common sense.

> There is a mountain of research to support this, I've already referenced for you.

links? From what you described though, the "research" doesn't confirm or deny anything. Like I said it only shows that children can learn functional. Doesn't show that functional is more natural then imperative.

>This doesn't look anything like C. It's completely imperative.

Do you mean functional?

>In what way? Declarative programming is all about eliding the how and leaving it up to the compiler. If you answer this question declaratively, it won't contain instructions to make a sandwich. Such details are left to the implementation.

No it can. Simply treat the time dimension as a spatial dimension. That's how FP languages do it. The "how" is simply a series of temporal tasks done in a certain order. If you treat time as physical geometry then you simply "declare" the whole procedure in one shot.

>I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm saying that children understand their world to be continuous even before they understand the number 1.

No this is not necessarily true. The brain is made up of multiple modules that understands things in different ways at the same time. The language module in your brain understands things discreetly by default, the spatial part of your brain understands things continuously. There is no "singular" form of understanding these concepts where one concept is understood before the other.