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Well, how to calculate sum from 1 to 5000 ? Instead of looping from 1 to 5000, you define the relationship instead: sum(1,n) = 1 + n + sum(2, n-1). Isn't this clearer to understand problem first, instead of just looping ?
do people really think this is clearer than looping.. my mind immediately goes to a loop here
some people think in both. they should write blogs and help the whats and the hows communicate.
Well, how to calculate sum from 1 to 5000 ? Instead of looping from 1 to 5000, you define the relationship instead: sum(1,n) = 1 + n + sum(2, n-1). Isn't this clearer to understand problem first, instead of just looping ?
sum(0) = 0
when n != 0: sum(n) = n + sum(n-1)
Loops have the potential to be very inefficient. As an exercise you can write two scripts in Javascript, one that has a for loop and another that does the same thing functionally. Then you can use Node to dump the VM instructions. You might be surprised at how many fewer instructions the functional version requires.
I had thought tail-call optimization was a way to get inefficient recursion to parity with iteration, by turning it into iteration. I'd never heard of recursion being faster on its own.
Is it a javascript-specific thing due to how their int types work?
Well, how to calculate sum from 1 to 5000 ? Instead of looping from 1 to 5000, you define the relationship instead: sum(1,n) = 1 + n + sum(2, n-1). Isn't this clearer to understand problem first, instead of just looping ?
There are many religions in programming world
Just get familiar with them, take what is sane and avoid the rest
Extremas are rarely the best
Be very careful with "why do X hate Y?" Generally speaking, if someone comes out as outright hating Y, their opinion should be taken with a pound of salt. Functional programming is fundamentally at odds with imperative constructs. It's not that people hate them, it's that they generally just don't fit the paradigm of "build a pipeline of steps (functions) and feed data into it" as well. Most of my software is functio…
>"build a pipeline and feed data into it." Arrows in Haskell are actually pretty good at building functional left to right data processing pipelines.
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[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Understanding_arrows
Once these came naturally, doing anything else starts to feel underconstrained and imprecise.
oh and loops constructs are not composable...
Well, how to calculate sum from 1 to 5000 ? Instead of looping from 1 to 5000, you define the relationship instead: sum(1,n) = 1 + n + sum(2, n-1). Isn't this clearer to understand problem first, instead of just looping ?
sum(1,n) = n*(n+1)/2
Which some compilers will produce for you, even if you use loops.
Maybe if you chose a different example, like generating power sets or the Fibonacci sequence, your point would be better made?