The author is aware of the logic programmign paradigm and constraint logic programming and has been "thinking a lot about Prolog" but only mentions imperative and functional in the article title because:
most programmers would just not use Prolog (too exotic) while they may be OK with JavaScript
That just makes me sad. I don't know how else to put it.
Learning new languages used to be fun, I think. Now we gotta mollycoddle programmers into thinking about "new" paradigms, which are really not new at all, by wrapping it all up in javascript otherwise they run away screaming?
Yeah, it's sad. It's the Worse is Better effect combined with momentum of legacy systems. You have to reuse things that have momentum to increase odds of your own thing having momentum. Three examples coming to mind were C++ building on C, successors using C-like syntax, and a number of languages integrating Java or .NET libraries. Those clean-slating solid concepts usually didn't go anywhere.
I admit I've only started programming around '99/00, but I don't remember learning "weird" languages being very popular even then. Mainstream communities mostly had a mix of C/C++/Java/Perl/PHP.
most programmers would just not use Prolog (too exotic) while they may be OK with JavaScript
That just makes me sad. I don't know how else to put it.
Learning new languages used to be fun, I think. Now we gotta mollycoddle programmers into thinking about "new" paradigms, which are really not new at all, by wrapping it all up in javascript otherwise they run away screaming?
I hope that's not true.