Blog Archive Discussion Light Table Imperative thinking and the making of sandwiches 18 Jul 2014 - Jamie Brandon People regularly tell me that imperative programming is the natural form of programming because 'people think imperatively'. I can see where they are coming from. Why, just the other day I found myself saying, "Hey Chris, I'm hungry. I need you to walk into the kitchen, open the cupboard, take out a bag of bread, open the bag, remove a slice of bread, place it on a plate..." Unfortunately, I hadn't specified where to find the plate so at this point Chris threw a null pointer exception and died. The truth is that people think in a variety of different ways in different situations. Most people resort to detailed imperative instructions only when describing complicated or unfamiliar tasks (or when explaining how to interact with a machine, which is itself indicati...