>Right, and you asked for a list and they gave it to you.

No I didn't. I asked how do you make a sandwich. The answer doesn't have to be in list form. The child chooses to give me the answer in list form.

Your question, however, the only possible answer is declarative form. There is no other choice. You structured the question in such a way that it demanded a singular answer. "What do you want for lunch?"

>I'll note here that the only temporal notion offered by the imperative paradigm is the notion of an ordered sequence. There are far richer treatments of time in other paradigms, which include temporal operators specifying "as soon as", "before", "after", "until", "whenever", etc. These concepts cannot be expressed directly in imperative paradigms.

Incorrect. the functional paradigm is a subset of imperative paradigm. Imperative is simply a series of functional programs with mutation. All "richer" treatments are therefore part of the imperative style.

>The notion of time in most imperative languages I know of is CPU-time, or instruction time. It has little to do with wall time, so appeals to how close imperative programming adheres to an concept of time that's intuitive due to human experience falls short. Indeed, I often experience students frustrated by the inability to cleanly model these concepts in imperative languages.

There is a notion of time that doesn't have to be so technical. The notion is that one thing happened after another thing, or another thing happened before something else. This concept is expressed through change. Mutation. When you remove mutation then this concept of time disappears.

>It's interesting that this is how you phrase it, because in my experience children do indeed naturally ask for sandwiches often before they can even describe how they're made. Have you ever seen a kid get mad that the jelly is on the bottom of the PB&J, only to placate them by turning it over? Such a child has no idea how the sandwich is made.

No, this simply means they know about the sandwich as a blackbox abstraction. This has nothing to do with monadic IO. If a child knew how to make a sandwich, he for sure wouldn't know how to express the construction process as monadic do notation.

>To be clear, I'm not saying it is more intuitive. I'm not even mounting a defense of functional programming here. I'm pushing back against the notion that c-style syntax is innately understood at a biological level. In your various posts here you seem to conflate syntax and semantics, which I don't understand because you seem experienced enough to know the difference. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I feel like you've offered a pretty full-throated argument, so perhaps I'm just not following. But I think we're talking past one another at this point.

I'm saying that c-style syntax is innately understood at the biological level. C-syntax is equivalent to procedural syntax or semantics or whatever you want to call it.

> There's no reason at all this imperative program must be strictly evaluated. Evaluating z can be deferred until it's clear that it's needed in the print call.

The imperative part of the program must be strictly evaluated. You only lazily evaluated the declarative part of your program where the values are immutable. x must be evaluated before y and before print because those values mutate. They cannot be done in different order.

All the immutable parts of your program can be evaluated out of order. But the mutable parts cannot be.

>To be clear, Logo is an multi-paradigm Lisp-like language.

I will have to see this language to know what you're talking about. But lisp is usually taught functional first. Children searching for documentation have to dig deeper to find the c like syntax. By nature of documentation and usage, children are more likely to bias towards functional over imperative simply because the bias of the manual and users are also heading in the same direction.

>But is that understood at an innate biological level? I think not. Human beings, and in particular students of programming, experience their world continuously in time and space. This is why they are surprised that 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3 in most languages.

Yes. A student readily understands 1, before understanding 1.0000111111. There's a dual interpretation arising from two separate modules in the brain. There's a part of the brain that's visual and there's another part that's symbolic and handles language.

The language aspect of our brain is by default discreet, the visual part is continuous. Our interpretation of symbols and language flowing through time is not continuous at all. But our interpretation of movement through space is.

>Throughout your posts, you are treating "here is how I make a sandwich" as programming, while you don't seem to consider "I want a sandwich" as programming. These are both programming. The former is imperative, the later is declarative.

No I'm saying here is "how I make a sandwich" can be EITHER declarative OR imperative. I am saying "I want a sandwich" is declarative programming with no way to convert to imperative.