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Ask HN: Which functional programming language is the popular enterprise choice?

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Re: Ask HN: Which functional programming language is the popular enterprise choice?

#23
post #2

I'd guess Scala is the most popular choice, but for nearly every language you'll find a company using it for at least parts of their products.

I like Scala, but it's still got mutable state, for loops, and lots of other imperative trappings. It's got some functional features, but I don't consider it to be a functional language (IMHO). If Scala is functional, then so are Ruby, JavaScript, and a host of other languages with higher order functions and the ability to be immutable, so long as you make the effort to not mutate anything (though anything is immutab…

While I agree that the ability to fall back on stateful imperative code makes it not a pure functional language, once you get into an immutable pattern it becomes less and less convenient or desirable to fall back on mutable data structures. I can't remember the last time I was even tempted to make something mutable. Also, in my experience it's required very little effort to convince new hires that are new to Scala to adopt this pattern.

Re: Ask HN: Which functional programming language is the popular enterprise choice?

#24
post #8

Clojure is gaining popularity. Staples uses it (their "SparX" group), and much more notably a Clojure service is used to process every single transaction in Walmart stores.

Can you or is there anything more to say about that Clojure service/Walmart? That sounds fascinating.

It was mentioned in passing at Clojure/West a few months ago. I wish I remembered more...this video might have more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av9Xi6CNqq4&list=PLZdCLR02gr...

Re: Ask HN: Which functional programming language is the popular enterprise choice?

#27
Javascript / Nodejs

it's multi-paradigm: scripting, object-oriented (prototype-based), imperative, functional ( source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript )

Many languages known as functional (Scala, F#, Lisp, Scheme, OCaml) are multi-paradigm languages (check out Wikipedia!), purely functional programming language like Haskell are the exception (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purely_functional ). And the IO part is hardly functional.

@Down voter: care to explain?

Re: Ask HN: Which functional programming language is the popular enterprise choice?

#28

Why hasn't haskell become popular?

Probably platform I would say. Hard to compete against languages that fit pretty naturally into an existing Java or .NET ecosystem. I'm referring to Scala, Clojure, and F# of course. It is definitely "popular" in some other senses though.

Re: Ask HN: Which functional programming language is the popular enterprise choice?

#30
post #27

Javascript / Nodejs it's multi-paradigm: scripting, object-oriented (prototype-based), imperative, functional ( source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript ) Many languages known as functional (Scala, F#, Lisp, Scheme, OCaml) are multi-paradigm languages (check out Wikipedia!), purely functional programming language like Haskell are the exception ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purely_functional ). And the IO pa…

All I can think is... Poe's Law.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztVMib1T4T4

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