Because it is difficult and funding flows to workflows which treat software like brick laying.
Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]
11–20 of 417 posts
Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]
#12Richard Gabriel’s famous essay “Worse is better” ( https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html ) is an interesting perspective on why Lisp lost to C. In a way, the same arguments (simplicity vs consistency vs correctness vs completeness) can be made for why functional programming lost to OOP. But those philosophical perspectives aside, personally I find my brain works very much like a Turing Machine, when dealing wi…
Beware: JWZ doesn't like people visiting his website from HN.
Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]
#13JavaScript isn't a functional language itself, but you can use a functional library like lodash/fp ( https://github.com/lodash/lodash/wiki/FP-Guide ) on top of it to get all that lovely functional goodness in your frontend and node code. Using lodash/fp has made my frontend state management code a lot nicer, and I'm really only just starting out with it.
Personally, I think JS is a fine functional language. Like you say, it doesn't have a good FP style system library, but it doesn't have a good anything style system library ;-) My main complaint is that currying is awkward. One thing I have discovered, though, is that closures are relatively slow (that is, unoptimised) in most implementations. In several implementations, they can also leak memory in certain circumstances. There is a very old outstanding bug in V8 that gives a lot of details about this... unfortunately I'm not in a position at the moment to go spelunking for it (I wish I'd saved a link...)
Anyway, I've done quite a few fairly large katas in JS using only an FP style of coding without any dependencies and I really enjoyed it.
Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]
#14I didn't listen to the video, but the title raises questions. What is functional programming? Nowadays, most languages are multi-paradigm, it's not so clear what is functional programming (or a functional programming language).
For instance, it's very common to have data types with mutable state in OCaml, or to use non-mutable data-structures, closures, higher-order functions in let say Python. I don't see such a clear dichotomy between functional/non-functional programming languages anymore.
Besides, there are other language "features" that I feel have more impact on the code I write. For instance, static/dynamic typing, asynchronous I/O vs actors vs threads, module systems.
I see functional programming more as a tool and a programming discipline, well-suited to solve some problems, rather than a paradigm that one should adhere no matter what.
Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]
#15Good ideas take a long time to catch on in tech, regardless of how much anyone believes its a fast moving industry.
Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]
#16JavaScript isn't a functional language itself, but you can use a functional library like lodash/fp ( https://github.com/lodash/lodash/wiki/FP-Guide ) on top of it to get all that lovely functional goodness in your frontend and node code. Using lodash/fp has made my frontend state management code a lot nicer, and I'm really only just starting out with it.
You may want to consider Ramda.js instead: https://ramdajs.com/ IMHO does a better job than Lodash, because: 1. All functions are automatically curried. 2. The order of parameters lends itself to composition. EDIT: 3. Transducers.
This. (No pun intended.) Lodash had its FP features bolted on as an afterthought, whereas Ramda was designed for it from the start.
Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]
#17I didn't listen to the video, but the title raises questions. What is functional programming? Nowadays, most languages are multi-paradigm, it's not so clear what is functional programming (or a functional programming language). For instance, it's very common to have data types with mutable state in OCaml, or to use non-mutable data-structures, closures, higher-order functions in let say Python. I don't see such a cle…
The talk actually takes time to answer these questions.
The title is also a bit clickbaity because the talk acknowledges that fp as a style is becoming common.
Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]
#18Richard Gabriel’s famous essay “Worse is better” ( https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html ) is an interesting perspective on why Lisp lost to C. In a way, the same arguments (simplicity vs consistency vs correctness vs completeness) can be made for why functional programming lost to OOP. But those philosophical perspectives aside, personally I find my brain works very much like a Turing Machine, when dealing wi…
In an old textbook I haven't been able to find again (browsing in another uni's library) regarding the Entscheidungsproblem I read that Church wrote to Turing, saying he thought the Turing Machine waa a more convincing/natural/intuitive representation of how mathematicians thought about algorithms than his own lambda calculus.
Maybe he was just being modest, or like John McCarthy, just didn't see or believe its potential.
Note that this was before computers or programming, and that there's no formal proof that a Turning machine can encode any computation - so its convincingness was important.
Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]
#19Richard Gabriel’s famous essay “Worse is better” ( https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html ) is an interesting perspective on why Lisp lost to C. In a way, the same arguments (simplicity vs consistency vs correctness vs completeness) can be made for why functional programming lost to OOP. But those philosophical perspectives aside, personally I find my brain works very much like a Turing Machine, when dealing wi…
> personally I find my brain works very much like a Turing Machine
Exactly this. How baking a cake in FP looks like:
* A cake is a hot cake that has been cooled on a damp tea towel, where a hot cake is a prepared cake that has been baked in a preheated oven for 30 minutes.
* A preheated oven is an oven that has been heated to 175 degrees C.
* A prepared cake is batter that has been poured into prepared pans, where batter is mixture that has chopped walnuts stirred in. Where mixture is butter, white sugar and brown sugar that has been creamed in a large bowl until light and fluffy
Taken from here: https://probablydance.com/2016/02/27/functional-programming-...
Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]
#20‘cause software development is as far away from math as plumbing. there, don’t need to watch the video anymore.