Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#21

Post by hyperpallium » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:22 AM UTC

lewisjoe wrote: post #6

Richard 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…

Even in maths, I find a solution in terms of the problem easier to understand than one in terms of the previous step.

Even when the recursive form is a more natural representation, like arithmetic sequences: start at s, increase by d with each step:

  a(0) = s, a(n) = a(n-1)+d

  a(n) = s + n*d

The analytical form seems simpler, neater, more "right" and more efficient to me - even though, if you want the whole sequence, the recursive form is more efficient (given tail-call optimisation).

I suspect I'm just not smart enough.

fp can be much shorter, and the execution model isn't actually hidden, just unfamiliar (and unintuitive and unnatural - for me). Consider: all suffixes of a list. In jq:

  while( length>0; .[1:] )

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#22

Post by asutekku » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:24 AM UTC

It might be nice to some but man if you are not required to learn a dozen different paradigms to use it. It’s expensive (harder to teach) and not intuitive for a beginner.

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#23

Post by BrissyCoder » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:33 AM UTC

People at the places I work keep memeing links to blog posts along the lines of "OOP is dead. Functional programming is the new king".

Yet to see a single line of a functional language in production.

As other commenters have mentioned most decent modern lanuages are multi-paradigm.

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#24

Post by geitir » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:34 AM UTC

slig wrote: post #12

lewisjoe wrote: post #6

Richard 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.

The fact to he took the time to do that shows who the real man-child is

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#25

Post by fheld » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:38 AM UTC

BrissyCoder wrote: post #23

People at the places I work keep memeing links to blog posts along the lines of "OOP is dead. Functional programming is the new king". Yet to see a single line of a functional language in production. As other commenters have mentioned most decent modern lanuages are multi-paradigm.

might be interesting for you, Lips in production:

https://tech.grammarly.com/blog/running-lisp-in-production

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#26

Post by antisemiotic » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:39 AM UTC

strangenessak wrote: post #19

lewisjoe wrote: post #6

Richard 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 ba…

And then you actually try to write it in a functional language, and end up with something like:

cake = map (cool . bake 30 175) . splitIntoPans $ mix [ butter, sugar, walnuts ]

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#27

Post by ben509 » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:40 AM UTC

galfarragem wrote: post #4

Borkdude wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video explains how JavaScript started out as a Scheme-dialect (Lisp) but for marketing reasons they chose a more Java-like syntax and adopted Java into the name.

An historical mistake that humanity is paying (and will pay) for a long time. Scheme 'cloths' was a viable option. Lisp remains the most popular scripting language among Autocad users despite Autodesk pushing other languages (.NET and JS). So popular that Autocad clones use it also as a scripting language[1]. Edited [1] https://www.zwsoft.com/zwcad/features#Dynamic-Block

Was it a mistake, though? Languages have to be accessible to their audience, and Javascript caught on because of its relatively gentle learning curve.

If SchemeScript hadn't caught on, it might have been that VBScript took over the web.

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#28

Post by chii » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:46 AM UTC

strangenessak wrote: post #19

lewisjoe wrote: post #6

Richard 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 ba…

but now that you've written the cake baking data type, with a little small tweak, you've got a bread baking data type.

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#29

Post by missosoup » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:49 AM UTC

chii wrote: post #28

strangenessak wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ba…

but now that you've written the cake baking data type, with a little small tweak, you've got a bread baking data type.

I'll find it more intuitive to do both as an imperative series of steps.

Some of my friends are in love with FP. I am not. I've done more FP than most, I can work with it, but my brain has never become in tune with it. I can bang out my intent as imperative code in real time, but with FP I have to stop and think to translate.

FP also means that I can't always easily tell the runtime complexity of what I'm writing and there's a complex black box between my code and the metal.

Maybe some of my friends' brains are superior and can think in FP, all the more power to them. but empirical evidence is that most people are not capable of that, so FP will probably forever remain in the shadow of imperative programming.

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#30

Post by _han » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:49 AM UTC

The top comment on YouTube raises a valid point:

> I've programmed both functional and non-functional (not necessarily OO) programming languages for ~2 decades now. This misses the point. Even if functional programming helps you reason about ADTs and data flow, monads, etc, it has the opposite effect for helping you reason about what the machine is doing. You have no control over execution, memory layout, garbage collection, you name it. FP will always occupy a niche because of where it sits in the abstraction hierarchy. I'm a real time graphics programmer and if I can't mentally map (in rough terms, specific if necessary) what assembly my code is going to generate, the language is a non-starter. This is true for any company at scale. FP can be used at the fringe or the edge, but the core part demands efficiency.