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

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

#31

Post by amrrs » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:50 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…

Same example of baking a cake to explain functional programming in R by Hadley Wickham. A good presentation.

https://speakerdeck.com/hadley/the-joy-of-functional-program...

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

#32

Post by jacobush » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:50 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.

Haha, that sounds like the C++ inheritance joke.

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

#33

Post by Ygg2 » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:51 AM UTC

geitir wrote: post #24

slig wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That, or he hates the HN hug of death.

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

#34

Post by turk73 » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:52 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.

We have tons of Functional code and it's growing every day. What is hard is hiring developers who have a decent background in it because there are so many maintenance and legacy systems out there and so many lazy developers who aren't staying current.

I will tell you, I typically don't hire a Java developer who hasn't done any streams programming at the very least. And that's not even really FP, but if someone can't understand immutability, lambdas, predicates, functions as first class objects, and how to solve coding problems in this fashion, then they're of little use because we're working with frameworks now that assume you know all this.

People get very upset when you tell them that the OOP patterns they learned are less useful these days.

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

#35

Post by dspillett » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:53 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.

Ah yes, I didn't remeber at first why that domain was added to my hosts blacklist.

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

#36

Post by Torwald » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:54 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'd rather have a baking class that takes an argument for what I want to bake, either bread or cake, and spares me the details of how baking is done. I don't have to know that a preheated oven is one that is at 175 grades etc

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

#37

Post by gitgud » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:55 AM UTC

geitir wrote: post #24

slig wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The fact that it's the only site I've seen that demonstrates the ability to read HTTP referral headers from hacker news shows who the real hacker is...

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

#38

Post by axilmar » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:56 AM UTC

Functional programming? absolutely 100% yes.

Functional programming languages? well, it depends on the problem.

If performance is an important issue, most of the time functional programming languages are a big 'no'.

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

#39

Post by mbrock » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:56 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…

I actually don't know of any functional programming languages that don't have syntactic and semantic support for writing step-by-step algorithms.

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

#40

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:57 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…

[deleted]