Introduction

In this arti­cle we will look at what a pro­gram­ming par­a­digm is for infor­ma­tion pur­pos­es and give some examples.

The first gen­er­a­tions of com­put­ers were pro­grammed using machine lan­guage, i.e. a sequence of instruc­tions was giv­en that the machine under­stood. As it was dif­fi­cult to remem­ber the codes of these instruc­tions, the Assem­bler lan­guage was cre­at­ed, which also con­sist­ed of a set of instruc­tions for the machine, but writ­ten with words sim­ple to remember.

With advances in tech­nol­o­gy, pro­gram­ming lan­guages emerged, allow­ing pro­gram­mers to increase the lev­el of abstrac­tion and solve more com­plex problems.

What is a Programming Paradigm?

Pro­gram­ming in high-lev­el lan­guages can take sev­er­al forms, i.e. we can tack­le prob­lem solv­ing from dif­fer­ent angles.

There are dif­fer­ent ways of design­ing a lan­guage and var­i­ous ways of work­ing to get the results that pro­gram­mers need. These ways of think­ing or work­ing are called PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE PARADIGM.

A con­tin­uación vamos a men­cionar algunos de estos paradigmas.

Imperative Paradigm

Pro­grams con­sist of a suc­ces­sion of instruc­tions or com­mands, as if the pro­gram­mer were giv­ing spe­cif­ic commands.

This is the sim­plest way to attack prob­lems, but it becomes inef­fi­cient when prob­lems are complex.

Logical Paradigm

This par­a­digm, as its name indi­cates, is based on log­i­cal think­ing, which is nat­ur­al for us to under­stand. Using log­ic, com­plex prob­lems can be expressed in a for­mal way, elab­o­rat­ing premis­es and then apply­ing hypothe­ses, axioms and the­o­rems for resolution.

Log­i­cal pro­gram­ming is opti­mal in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence appli­ca­tions. The Pro­log lan­guage uses this paradigm.

Functional Paradigm

This par­a­digm con­sists of cre­at­ing func­tions that solve a cer­tain type of prob­lems and then call­ing them when need­ed. These func­tions may con­tain oth­er func­tions with­in them.

Some lan­guages that use this par­a­digm are Haskell and Python. 

Object Oriented Paradigm

In this par­a­digm mod­els of objects are con­struct­ed, which are abstract enti­ties that have defined a set of data and func­tions inside.

Go to the Object Ori­ent­ed Pro­gram­ming section.

Some lan­guages that use this par­a­digm are C++, Java and C#.