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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]

#71

Post by weberc2 »

_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 all for mechanical sympathy, and I’m sure that some programmers legitimately need their language to map neatly to assembly, but that isn’t the norm as evidenced by the overwhelming popularity of interpreted and VM languages. Lots of companies are making money hand over fist with Python, which is probably 3 orders of magnitude (or more) slower than the optimized C or C++ that this real-time graphics engineer is writing.

EDIT: Is this controversial? What are downvoters taking issue with? That Python is a very popular language? That it is much slower than C/C++?

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

#72

Post by mannykannot »

_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…

OK, but dismissing most of the things that people use computers for as "the fringe" is rather parochial.

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

#73

Post by capdeck »

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

I used to work in a company that had part of the process written in Lisp and it was in true production. Once the (fp) guy left the company everyone else had to support that code. What a nightmare that was. No one wanted to touch it with a ten foot pole. Should we had another FP guru in our midst, that may have turned out differently. But everyone was in agreement that that part needs to be rewritten in a language that everyone else is using. In real life - if most stuff in your company is FP and there is plenty of expertise to go around - do FP. If not - do not. :-)

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

#74

Post by thih9 »

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…

If you want to bake a cake, FP like this could seem awkward.

But what if you want to run a bakery and split the work across multiple cooks? In that case it helps to have clearly defined ingredients.

I'm only trying to say that it all depends on the context. Obviously personal preference is a big factor too.

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

#75

Post by u801e »

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…

You should read the OOP version of "for want of a nail" proverb near the end of this post (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...).

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

#76

Post by strangenessak »

p33p wrote: post #42
antisemiotic wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ]

I think partial application and pipe operators make this so very intuitive though: [butter, sugar, walnuts] |> mix() |> splitIntoPans(pans = 3) |> bake(time = 30, temp = 175) |> cool(time = 5)

We can improve the syntax further

    [butter, sugar, walnuts]
    mix()
    splitIntoPans(pans = 3)
    bake(time = 30, temp = 175)
    cool(time = 5)
Hmm, wait a second.....

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

#77

Post by throwaway87537 »

typon wrote: post #68
Ragib_Zaman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Streeter here.

Although I don’t work directly with the FPGA stuff, it’s still a very, very small piece of the overall pie (and new).

The motivation behind using Ocaml is mainly in its correctness(!) not because it’s fast (it’s not). See Knight Capital for a good example as to why. There are great videos on YT by Yaron Minsky that explain this better than I can.

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

#78

Post by gpderetta »

I do not pretend to be a particularly skilled programmer, but in my not so long career I have picked up a bunch of tools: a few algorithms here and there, some data structures, some programming techniques like encapsulation, late binding, higher order functions, pipelines, various form of polymorphism (dynamic, static, ad hoc, inheritance based, structural or whatever), some concurrency patterns (message passing, shared memory, whatever). I end up using whatever seems more appropriate to me for a specific problem depending on intuition, personal preference and experience.

Now, various subsets of the items above have been labeled with different names (functional, procedural, OOO, generic, whatever), but of course most of the time no two people can agree on which subset deserves which label.

I must not be the only one, because a lot (but not all) of very successful languages are not very opinionated and let people mix and match bits as needed.

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

#79

Post by gpderetta »

typon wrote: post #68
Ragib_Zaman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"A FORTRAN programmer can write FORTRAN in any language"
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