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Kishotenketsu Programming?

Posted by Cliff on from the what-if-Buddha-had-written-perl dept.

mike_stay asks: "Imperative Programming follows closely the 'outline' style of writing most of us were taught in elementary school. Japanese, however, have a very hard time with that writing style, as they've been trained in the concept of kishotenketsu: stories are usually told by bouncing around between various points of view, which necessarily give different accounts; no attempt is made to say what 'really' happened. 'Good writing style' expects readers to draw the conclusions; writing that is too explicit is not valued. The writing, therefore, tends to be inductive: specific examples precede general principles. The closest thing I can think of to kishotenketsu in programming is functional programming or declarative languages, but then, I'm American. Would other readers point me at other languages with this type of 'eastern' feel?"

2 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Obvious answer? by Dr.+Photo · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Ruby is a programming language that was born and raised in its native Japan, which means it may very well be, by definition, what you say you're looking for.

    Incidentally, Ruby, though purely-OO, supports nifty things like true closures, and you can end up doing functional programming without realizing it at first [Ruby, of course, is designed with this sort of thing in mind]. It was the realization that I was doing this (or something very close to it), in conjunction with Paul Graham's essays that got me interested in Scheme (a sleek, lightweight dialect of Lisp).

    So, perhaps the only real answer is to learn as many interesting programming languages as you can, and use the broadened perspective you gain to make an informed decision for yourself.

  2. no play in my ride by kapital · · Score: 5, Funny

    Kishotenketsu is a result of the Japanese aversion to direct confrontation, and consiousness of status.

    exactly! what you'd end up with is an api that has 100 different functions all of which can only individually hint at the general direction of the output without making any kind of assertion about what is actually the correct output given your parameters. and care would be taken so that one function stands out as an obvious alternative to the others, except for maybe the more "senior" functions that have been built into the library from some time back. but, that's ok, because those functions, while the most obvious to use, would be the least useful in terms of the quality and clarity of values returned.

    this gets no play in my ride.