(I should know better than to post ambiguous one-liners late at night.)

It's certainly not an uncommon preference, but it's an unfashionable statement, at least among the intellectual circles that programming language designers with PhDs (or almost-PhDs!) tend to belong to. That's why I was interested to read it there. I've long had a joke, when asked if I prefer FP or OO, to say "I prefer imperative programming". It's funny because of that fashion. What I was wondering was whether said fashion was in place by the late 90s when dmr apparently wrote this, in which case maybe there was a trace of a joke there as well.

Edit: having read more of the OP, it seems to me deliciously apropos that his dissertation involved replacing recursive logic with loops.

But fashion != popularity. Indeed, the most popular thing in a field is almost definitionally unfashionable.