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

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

#61

Post by pyrale »

pas wrote: post #49
mbrock wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Could you elaborate on this a bit? Basically calling a functions form an other is how a step-by-step algorithm would work in FP, no? And pattern match on what comes in, and return an immutable copy. For example you can put functions in a list, and push a datastructure through them, like a pipeline. edit: https://probablydance.com/2016/02/27/functional-programming-...

The control structure that takes the different functions/values and glue them together is what makes your code imperative or descriptive. While there is a lot of overlap between descriptive style and fp, it is not always the case.

In haskell, for instance, the do notation lets you write imperative code:

    f  article = do 
       x
...and then the compiler desugars it to a more descriptive form.

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

#62

Post by Ragib_Zaman »

_han wrote: post #30

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 col…

Perhaps not a satisfactory response but when I start drifting towards thinking FP is fundamentally not as performant as _whatever_else_, I remember that Jane Street uses OCaml basically from top to bottom, and they certainly can't be too slow... Some black magic going on there.

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

#63

Post by Ragib_Zaman »

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.

Jane Street is OCaml basically from top to bottom. They seem pretty fast.

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

#64

Post by jt2190 »

hyperpallium wrote: post #21
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,…

Lately I’ve been thinking that a lot of code style debates center around an explicit versus implicit axis. Imperative is more explicit, and, in one sense, easier to see what’s going on since it lays everything out step by step. On the other hand, those same steps are a mix of essential steps (that deal with the problem being solved) and accidental steps (that deal with computer and code in order to get the job done.)

It seems to me that OOP, Functional, and Relational programming models try to abstract away the accidental steps, but like all abstractions there are limitations.

I suspect that once familiar with one of these models, imperative seems awfully tedious, however now the code is more obscure to those not well versed in the paradigm, thus we have a trade off between ease of use for many and optimal for some.

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

#65

Post by marvin »

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.

True, but what if you never wanted bread?

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

#66

Post by wil421 »

robjan wrote: post #55
wil421 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What has he done? Everyone’s commenting he doesn’t like HN but when I clicked the link everything looks fine. Serious question.

You must be using Brave or a browser plugin which doesn't send referral headers. If you use a normal browser, it displays a testicle in an egg cup with a silly phrase complaining about the demographic of HN users.

I’m using iOS safari with AdGuard. It’s probably AdGuard.

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

#67

Post by enlyth »

Tade0 wrote: post #5
onion2k wrote: post #2

JavaScript 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.

I never understood the point of Ramda. It's like it's trying to replace the core functionality of JS with something that's completely orthogonal to what the language actually is, but it's just a bolted on library.

I've worked on codebases where people ignore all built-in JS functions (like Array.map/filter) and write Ramda spaghetti instead with multiple nested pipes and lens and what not to show off their FP purism.

Most of the time, you don't need any of this, it just makes the codebase unreadable, and hard for new people to join the project and be productive in a timely fashion.

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

#68

Post by typon »

Ragib_Zaman wrote: post #62
_han wrote: post #30

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 col…

Perhaps not a satisfactory response but when I start drifting towards thinking FP is fundamentally not as performant as _whatever_else_, I remember that Jane Street uses OCaml basically from top to bottom, and they certainly can't be too slow... Some black magic going on there.

Jane Street wrote a compiler that converts Ocaml to Verilog which they run on FPGAs. The OCaml you write in that case is pretty different than what you write for CPUs.

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

#69

Post by de_watcher »

_han wrote: post #30

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 col…

I'm a true believer that with C++ and lots of scary templates you can do FP that maps exactly on what you want it to be doing.

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

#70

Post by juki »

fheld wrote: post #25
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

Notice that they are using Common Lisp, which is a multi-paradigm language, rather than a more functional lisp like Clojure.
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