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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]

#81

Post by gameswithgo »

mannykannot wrote: post #72
_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.

I think he means more "the outer layers". For instance Alpha Go was written in Python at the outer layers. The core pieces doing the actual neural net work are low level libraries.

Similarly, google search, at the outer most layers, is javascript, then probably some layer of Go or similar, but then the core is highly tuned C++ and assembler.

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

#82

Post by gameswithgo »

weberc2 wrote: post #71
_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 wr…

we users pay a price for this trend though :( Those python users could switch to F#/OCaml/Clojure and get a big speed boost too!

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

#83

Post by pyrale »

axilmar wrote: post #38

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'.

Well, if performance is really an issue, I guess anything that is not C, C++, rust or a thin wrapper over those languages or legacy libs written in the likes of Fortran won't be an option, so yes.

That being said, it seems like performance is not an issue for most of the code written these days, aside from not writing quadratic solutions for problems solvable in linear time.

If you use java, .net, go or the likes, odds are you would be fine with a functional language ; and if you need performance with those languages, odds are that you will need arcane knowledge equivalent to what you would need to know to make performant fp code.

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

#84

Post by Ragib_Zaman »

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.

That certainly explains a whole lot. Thanks!

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

#85

Post by fetbaffe »

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…

One language that was not on the presenters list is SQL, very popular, but not OO nor functional.

One thing lot of programmers do is to abstract SQL to OO style, even though SQL describes a relation that can be computed to a result, in some way similar to a function, but it seems that most prefer to look at is has a state, even though it doesn't.

Sure, the tables where data is stored has a state, but the sum of the tables is a relationship in time & depending how you look at it you get different results. It is very hard to map relationships to OO correctly.

It is probably easier for most people to think about the world as set of things rater than a relation in time. Many of our natural languages are organized around things.

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

#86

Post by onion2k »

enlyth wrote: post #67
Tade0 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is exactly how I felt when I inherited a big project that uses lodash/fp. Having spent ~6 months with the code now I prefer having a functional layer on top of JS. It does make sense.

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

#87

Post by dustingetz »

_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…

A niche like JVM and AWS

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

#88

Post by classified »

_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 regularly read the assembly output of the OCaml compiler I'm using and there are very few surprises. The mapping from source to generated assembly is quite straightforward. You couldn't say the same for Haskell, though. So it depends on which FP language you're using.

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

#89

Post by weberc2 »

gameswithgo wrote: post #82
weberc2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wr…

we users pay a price for this trend though :( Those python users could switch to F#/OCaml/Clojure and get a big speed boost too!

You missed my point—the original comment argued that the software industry is in such great need for performance that functional programming is unacceptable (apart from niche use cases). If that we’re true, then Python and other slow languages wouldn’t be so wildly used. I fully agree that we’re leaving performance on the table by not using functional languages or virtually any other tier of languages including my personal favorite: Go.

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

#90

Post by StreamBright »

_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…

>> This is true for any company at scale

I do not think this is true outside your domain. Amazon uses Java, C++ and Perl. At the time I was there majority of the website code was in Perl. Amazon one of the biggest companies on the planet.

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