[vegetor]

People used to test programs on paper ... Your imagination is at least as mighty, albeit often slower than a PC. English is badly defined, I rather thought about logic. The languages don't really matter, all share the same fundamentals. For algorithms, FP seems just as beloved: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp

[p1esk]

Sure, but to know the algorithms is not enough. I remember I was asked to implement a certain prime numbers search algorithm in C, and I spent many hours trying to wrap my head around how to do it, even though the algorithm itself was perfectly clear to me. Not only that, I then spent several more hours trying to make it faster, which is also language specific. So the language does matter in my opinion.