Imperative programming is a programming paradigm where you tell the computer what to do and how to do it, like a bossy micromanager. It's the programming equivalent of giving your significant other turn-by-turn directions to the grocery store instead of just telling them to pick up some milk and trusting them to figure out the rest.

How to use it in a sentence

• I was trying to debug this legacy imperative programming code, but it was like trying to untangle a bowl of spaghetti - I kept finding meatballs of global state and side effects everywhere.

• The new hire was excited to try out functional programming, but the senior engineer just rolled their eyes and said, "Kid, we do imperative programming here. If it was good enough for grandpa's COBOL, it's good enough for our enterprise Java monolith."

If you actually want to learn more...

• Improve Your Programming Skills: This article provides 10 ways to leverage resources at your company to level up your coding game, like studying the code of engineering legends or seeking out the harshest code reviewers to tear your pull requests to shreds.

• Programming FAQ: Paul Graham drops some wisdom on topics like what editor to use (spoiler: just pick one and start coding already) and why Lisp is the ultimate galaxy brain language.

• Programming Environments: Martin Fowler blogs about various programming environment topics, from the endless debate over using a single language to the horrors of XML abuse.

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