Category talk:Programming paradigms

I understand what you meant by including Unix philosophy as a programming paradigm but, IMO, the way that article is written does not emphasize those aspects of the Unix programming philosophy that could be construed as distinct paradigm (heavy use of pipes, small generic programs, stdin & stdout, etc.). &mdash; danakil 07:16, Aug 22, 2004 (UTC)

Danakil, it is standard practice and treats the reader kindly to place the introductory paragraph of the referring article into the page. We should not rely on having others to chase links just to understand what the category is talking about. Dysprosia 12:00, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * Agreed, Dysprosia. The key point here is what actually is enough to "just understand what the category is talking about". I am currently of the opinion that an approach analogous to that of disambiguation pages is sufficient: within a short sentence, they directly point to the article that describes each alternative. Copying the first two paragraphs from the respective articles into each option is not often done, is it? For, if more information is desired in either the category or disambig page, I guess the thing to do is to figure out how to achieve that while avoiding:
 * a) old copies of the article, usually quite outdated (with respect to what's considered the currently accepted content in the article)
 * b) non-sensical partial copies of the article (often enough it is not the case that the first one or two paragraphs of the article fail to be coherent in isolation)

Regarding the issue of standard practice, Wikipedia is in its early stages, it would not neccessarily be wise to settle firmly on a set of practices developed in its infancy as it becomes a mature project. Furthermore, from what I've seen, I'm not certain that copying the first one or two paragraphs of the main article is unquestionably a widespread "standard practice". I think this matter is of the utmost importance, as I'm strongly in favor of a coherent, consistent, and exhaustive categorization system... I'm happy to work with you towards such an end. &mdash; danakil 18:42, Aug 30, 2004 (UTC)


 * A sentence is hardly enough, especially not a self-referential one. If two paragraphs is too much, perhaps we can just have one? I have only used the first paragraph elsewhere, I felt that for this instance two would have been suitable here, but that may not be the case in everyone's eyes, as you pointed out. In any case, it is unlikely to be the case that the first paragraph of an article will wildly change, so it will not be stale all that often. Dysprosia 23:11, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * Looks like we need a new feature: a template-ish thing to include the first X paragraphs in another page. This would be perfect, ya? ··gracefool |&#9786; 06:55, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * Yes, of course :) Dysprosia 06:30, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Are these really all paradigms?
There are a lot of dubious paradigms listed here, I feel. The wikipedia article says: "A programming paradigm is a fundamental style of computer programming." Perhaps I am injecting my own biases here, but my interpretation of this is a general framework for describing algorithms that solve problem instances. In my view, classic examples include procedural, object-oriented, functional, etc.

"Write once, run anywhere," "lazy evaluation," are examples of properties of languages. "Don't repeat yourself," "Convention over Configuration," are (possibly well-considered) practices. "Ousterhout's dichotomy," "Conway's Law," seem to be simply related.

If people agree that this list is being cluttered up by these "paradigms that aren't," I'm willing to begin the process of pruning the list. I suppose the polite thing to do is ask on the questionable pages whether they object to be delisted? I'm not a wikipedian, really... Thebigclaw (talk) 04:10, 13 April 2008 (UTC)