Programming Paradigms

A programming paradigm is a way of programming, and of constructing programming languages that support that way. It is not about details such as where to place parentheses and semicolons, but about how you think and how to structure your programs. In this course, we study, compare and try out different programming paradigms, such as functional programming, logic programming and parallel programming. So-called "vibe coding", giving instructions to an AI that then writes the program, can also be seen as a paradigm. Most programmers still work with various types of imperative programming. It is the oldest paradigm, and reflects how the computer works, since the programmer must specify step by step what the computer should do. A variant of imperative programming which many people are used to is object-oriented programming. In contrast to imperative programming there is also declarative programming, which means that the programmer specifies, or "declares", conditions that the result must meet, and then the computer itself chooses how to achieve this. Part of the course also deals with how compilers and interpreters work to execute programs within different paradigms.