Abstract

I show in this paper that programming paradigms, such as imperative or functional programming, can be put in correspondence with computing styles of calculating tools. The Chinese abacus actually follows a functional programming paradigm, while the ancient Chinese counting rods display an imperative programming style. More generally, I show that abstract concepts, such as currying or the semantics of programming languages, can be transposed from theoretical computer science to the historical description of the practice of computing tools.