Question
As stated, have you any tips to help grok / understand / get-your-head-around declarative programming languages?
Or is it simply a case that you’ve to immerse yourself in the language and it’s syntax, until it seeps in, until you get that golden moment where you Get It. This isn’t really an option as I can no longer lock myself in a room for days on end, poring over half a dozen different books on the subject matter (responsibilities being what they are and all)
So, any tips or tricks that helped you when you tackled declarative languages, any insights to pass on?
P.S. I’ll personally upvote the first answer that says “Shutup and put in the work”.
Background
I was 13 years old I when I first started wring code (basic, on my sisters Oric-1).
Since then I’ve worked with many new concepts and many different languages, taking all in my stride, me taking the upper hand quickly enough. Object Orientation? Not a bother. Event driven paradigms? Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast.
Owl, Mfc, ActiveX, Vb3, 4, 5 & 6, VB.Net, Pascal, Delphi, C, C++ & C#. None have stood in my way, at least not for very long.
However recently my perfect score has taken a bit of a battering.
A couple of weeks ago I threw myself into Xaml, and folks, I’m more sinking than swimming.
I think my main problem is that it’s declarative. All my other programming skills are procedural. I’ve hit this block before with MSBuild, I can copy examples of how to get MSBuild things working, but would be lost putting something together from scratch.
Back to Xaml, currently I’m going insane trying to wire triggers to properties and get the effect’s I need.
I may post my specific Xaml question here soon enough. For now I’m asking this general “declarative programming” question.
P.S. No, I’m not actually this cocky. Yes, I stumbled like hell the first time I hit OO and the first time I’d to write an event driven UI (VB3 on Windows 3.11).
Edit
It’s starting to sink in, the tenacity that got me this far in this field is paying off, it just takes so much fracking time!
. . . I think I’m getting too old for this stuff . . . 🙂
I had to teach XSL (or XSLT, as you wish) a bunch at the beginning of the century :), and it’s a different world, really. That, however, is the basis for the paradigm-shift: you have to realize that declarative languages really are different. The most important advice I have is to keep studying other people’s solutions, put the work in, and really try to stop thinking in FLOW. The worst thing is that, in XSL, there is an “if” and an “else,” but usually there’s another way to do things.
Unlike learning OO, in XSL (or any declarative language, I suppose) you will not manage to do what you’re trying to do unless you do it declaratively.
So the answer is in part, “shut up and do the work” as you suggest, but the more important point is to realize that a lot of the work is getting your head around the paradigm shift. So the real answer is, “keep your eyes peeled for the paradigm shift.” You have to stop thinking in flow and start thinking in terms of rules that can fire in any order… if they’re done right, it doesn’t matter when they fire. When you are finally thinking in rules instead of WHEN stuff happens, you’re beginning to grok the shift.