A preliminary analysis on the shift of programming paradigms

The shift of programming paradigm (PP)s is referred to as the transfer from a prior learnt PP to another new PP. The inability for a programmer to shift to a new PP could cause some potential problems to their programming solutions. In this paper, a preliminary analysis to uncover several research questions and potential problems that impact the shift of PPs was conducted. Since the main programming workforce comes from the institution of higher learning, the institution´s current implementation of PP courses will be discussed. In order to get current and professional views on PPs, difficulty of learning a new PP and the importance of PPs in the industry, an online close-ended survey was deployed to a group of experienced computing and computer-related professionals. Since postgraduate (PG) Computer Science (CS) students have substantial experience learning PPs and the CS field in general, several PG CS students were also informally interviewed. The results from the survey, informal interview and cited literature were used to support the development of the research questions. From the survey, many stressed that PPs are essential to understand in order to work in the industry. Also, it has been found from the survey that poor teaching style is the main contributor for the difficulty of learning a new PP.