How Many Paradigms Does It Take to Screw In a Lightbulb?

A broad tour of programming paradigms—imperative, procedural, OOP, functional, logic, declarative, concatenative, reactive, aspect-oriented, metaprogramming, dependent types, theorem proving, actor model, dataflow, and constraint programming—illustrated with short code examples in C, Haskell, Prolog, RxJS, Erlang, Agda, and others. The central argument is that a competent mid-level-plus developer must be fluent in at least five paradigms, because each one is a distinct mental tool for solving problems. Modern multi-paradigm languages like Scala, Rust, Python, and F# reward developers who can draw on multiple approaches rather than forcing every problem through a single familiar lens.