This is a substantial piece of writing with information many here would find interesting; putting it behind a buzzfeed list style headline does it a disservice. One step short of calling it "Six weird programming paradigms that will blow your mind".
I thought it was a tiny but deliberate master-stroke of tongue-in-cheek irony. Or maybe the author was really after that buzzfeed crowd ;) I any case, I bet I wasn't the only one who thought "well, HN is going downhill fast" first, and came out glad my prejudices were tested.
Just because Buzzfeed uses list style headlines and has vacuous content does not mean that list style headlines are an indicator of vacuous content. If you read this and you liked it, does the title really matter?
Exactly. Plus, while the content might be vacuous it's often quite entertaining and the editorial style is genius, in my opinion. I think writers can probably learn 41 things from Buzzfeed.
Changing paradigms has to change the way you think about things, by definition. By the scientific definition of "paradigm", at least, but I think it's no less true for programming paradigms.
I think the idea is that we usually don't change paradigms. However, by broadening our perspective we can gain insights into our existing code. An example of a paradigm that won't change the way you think about code is a cyclic tag system. You might find it interesting to know about, but I doubt that knowledge would change the way you write code.
As a concrete example, learning pure functional programming gives me another perspective on the OO code I write; ie. that methods are functions where the first argument is the implicit "this" and the body of the function contains a top-level pattern-match on the class tag. This perspective has helped me avoid over-complicating my code at times.
