Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 417 posts

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

#281

Post by jasode »

mbo wrote: post #266
jasode wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My personal belief? We just don't teach it.[...] Grads come out with a 4 year headstart on a non-FP paradigm, I don't agree the lack of proactive education is the reason FP isn't the norm. Your conclusion doesn't take into account the counterfactuals : - C Language took off in popularity despite BASIC/Pascal being the language more often taught in schools - languages like PHP/Javascript/Python/Java all became popula…

> Why does functional programming need to be taught in schools but all the other various programming topics did not? Because I think it is harder for people who have programmed with other paradigms - following an inverse law, most things should get easier to learn with experience, not harder. It's foreign, it's weird, it's back to front. It doesn't have an immediately obvious benefit to what people are used to, and t…

>Because I think it is harder for people who have programmed with other paradigms

I still think there's something missing in your theory of cause-&-effect. A math topic like quaternions is hard and yet programmers in domains like 3d graphics and games have embraced it more than FP.

I also think Deep Learning / Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence is even more difficult than Functional Programming and it seems like Deep Learning (e.g. Tensorflow, Pytorch, etc) will spread throughout the computer industry much more than FP. Just because the topic is hard can't be the defining reason.

>The only reason FP has been successful as it is, is because its evangelists are incredibly vocal,

But why is FP in particular only successful because of loud evangelists? Why can't FP's benefits be obvious so that it doesn't require evangelists? Hypothetical example:

- Company X's software using FP techniques is 10x smaller code base, 10x less bugs, and 10x faster feature development -- than Company Y. Ergo, this is why Company X is worth $10 billion while Company Y is only worth $1 billion or bankrupt.

If you think the above would be an unrealistic and therefore unfair comparison, keep in mind the above productivity improvement happened with the industry transition from assembly language to C Language. (A well-known example being 1980s WordPerfect being written in pure assembly language while MS Word was written in C Language. MS Word was iterating faster. WordPerfect eventually saw how assembly was holding them back and finally migrated to C but it was too late.) Yes, there's still some assembly language programming but it's niche and overshadowed in use by higher-level languages like C/C++.

If Functional Programming isn't demonstrating a similar real world massive productivity improvement to Imperative Programming, why is that? I don't think it's college classes. (Again, see all the non-PhD enthusiasts jumping on the free FastAI classes and brushing up on Linear Algebra to teach themselves deep learning.)

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

#282

Post by thomascgalvin »

gambler wrote: post #267
mbo wrote: post #254

EDIT: I wrote this comment before watching the video. I stand by this comment, but the video is very good and I wholeheartedly agree with its conclusions. As someone who writes pure FP for a living at a rather large and well known org, these threads physically hurt me. They're consistently full of bad takes from people who don't like FP, or haven't written a lick of it. Subsequently, you get judgements that are chock…

What a coincidence. This sounds exactly like what happens with OOP. Every discussion here gets swarmed with clueless people who think Java is the apex of OO programming, because that's what gets taught in universities these days. They don't understand any of the core concepts that prompted Xerox Park to develop the OO paradigm in the first place. They aren't aware of any of the relevant research. They operate under t…

> Every discussion here gets swarmed with clueless people who think Java is the apex of OO programming, because that's what gets taught in universities these days.

Realistically, Java (or something very much like it) is the apex of OOP, at least as most people will experience it. The Ur-example of OOP might be a beautiful, internally consistent vision of mathematical purity, but most of us will never experience it.

Similarly, Agile-fall is the most common form of Agile that people will experience, which is why we always fall into "no true Scotsman" territory when ~~arguing about~~ discussing it.

There is, I think, a disconnect between people who are primarily concerned with the beauty of software - simple models, elegant algorithms, and so on - and the people who are primarily concerned with getting their feature branch merged to master so their manager will let them go to their kid's soccer game.

The beauty of software is important, and there's value in trying to bring the useful, but more esoteric concepts of CS into the mainstream, but at the same time we need to be aware of the ground truth of software development.

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

#283

Post by arximboldi »

_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…

There is some truth to that. I write a lot of performance intensive interactive software (music software, graphics software), and use C++ for that. However, you can bring a lot of the FP into C++ world, use it when appropriate, and reason about performance all the way through. I spend a lot of time building tools to make it easier, like for example: https://github.com/arximboldi/immer https://github.com/arximboldi/lager

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

#284

Post by nice_byte »

nybble41 wrote: post #236
falcolas wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it's the analogy leaking, but in baking, order of operations matters, and some operations must be done in parallel (pre-heating, based on initial oven state) to produce a good end product.

Yes, and this is one of the areas where functional programming really shines. An imperative program is defined as a series of ordered steps and the compiler can't (in general) reorder steps to optimize use of resources because the steps could have arbitrary side-effects.[1] The FP version is essentially a dependency graph which constrains the order of operations without mandating a specific final order. The pre-heate…

> the compiler can't (in general) reorder steps to optimize use of resources

i'm not sure what you mean by that because compilers reorder instructions to improve performance all the time (and CPUs do it dynamically too).

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

#285

Post by jimbokun »

_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…

But it should be fine, then, as a replacement for anything written in Javascript, Ruby, Python, etc.

(Also, addressed in the video at the end, answering an audience member question.)

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

#286

Post by dragonwriter »

jasode wrote: post #259
mbo wrote: post #254

EDIT: I wrote this comment before watching the video. I stand by this comment, but the video is very good and I wholeheartedly agree with its conclusions. As someone who writes pure FP for a living at a rather large and well known org, these threads physically hurt me. They're consistently full of bad takes from people who don't like FP, or haven't written a lick of it. Subsequently, you get judgements that are chock…

>My personal belief? We just don't teach it.[...] Grads come out with a 4 year headstart on a non-FP paradigm, I don't agree the lack of proactive education is the reason FP isn't the norm. Your conclusion doesn't take into account the counterfactuals : - C Language took off in popularity despite BASIC/Pascal being the language more often taught in schools - languages like PHP/Javascript/Python/Java all became popula…

> C Language took off in popularity despite BASIC/Pascal being the language more often taught in schools

While C is less constrained, it's structurally very similar to Pascal; they don't differ in paradigm and are in the same syntax family.

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

#287

Post by pnako »

Because it's not that useful.

There is an contest organized by the International Conference on Functional Programming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICFP_Programming_Contest

It was more or less designed to show the superiority of functional programming languages. Yet in that contest C++ has done better than OCaml or Haskell...

The FP crowd seems to be more active doing advocacy than writing code. Yes, we know, there is that one trading company using OCaml. It's such a niche language that they have to pretty much maintain the toolchain and standard library themselves. Meanwhile, plenty of more successful companies use C++, C# or Java with no problem.

If you want to convince someone of the superiority of FP, write a real killer application. A new browser to compete with Chrome, a video game that can dethrone Skyrim or the Witcher 3. Maybe a DBMS that's even better than PostgreSQL? Basically: show, don't talk.

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

#288

Post by gambler »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #282
gambler wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a coincidence. This sounds exactly like what happens with OOP. Every discussion here gets swarmed with clueless people who think Java is the apex of OO programming, because that's what gets taught in universities these days. They don't understand any of the core concepts that prompted Xerox Park to develop the OO paradigm in the first place. They aren't aware of any of the relevant research. They operate under t…

> Every discussion here gets swarmed with clueless people who think Java is the apex of OO programming, because that's what gets taught in universities these days. Realistically, Java (or something very much like it) is the apex of OOP, at least as most people will experience it. The Ur-example of OOP might be a beautiful, internally consistent vision of mathematical purity, but most of us will never experience it. S…

>Realistically, Java (or something very much like it) is the apex of OOP [...]

By this logic Java Streams are the apex of functional programming and anyone who uses them is fully qualified to dismiss the paradigm, even if they don't know anything about proper functional languages.

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

#289

Post by mikekchar »

verttii wrote: post #92
mikekchar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think JS is a fine functional language. Like you say, it doesn't have a good FP style system library, but it doesn't have a good anything style system library ;-) My main complaint is that currying is awkward. One thing I have discovered, though, is that closures are relatively slow (that is, unoptimised) in most implementations. In several implementations, they can also leak memory in certain circumsta…

Personally I find functional style awkward in js. Mostly because data is not immutable, there are no functional operators (composition, application etc.) and no algebraic data types + pattern matching. But most importantly, prototypal inheritance, in other words invoking the object's own methods as if they were pure functions is what really puts me off.

A lot of that stuff is pretty modern in terms of FP, though. It's definitely not a pure functional language, though quite a lot of the data is actually immutable. It was really surprising to me that strings are immutable (but as the other commenter pointed out, they don't throw if you try to mutate them, so it's not that convenient). "Objects" and arrays are mutable, but it's pretty easy to avoid mutating them if you want to.

It probably wasn't clear, but the reason I didn't use any dependencies is because I was avoiding JS's built in inheritance mechanism, which I don't think is very compatible with FP. You can build objects out of closures and build your own object oriented mechanisms if you want. Unfortunately you run into the limitations of the implementations I mentioned.

I always hesitate to link to my own "fun" code, but just so you understand that I was not looking for code quality in this: https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy But it shows how I was using an FP style in JS to implement an alternative OO system. I really had fun writing this code and would have continued if there weren't problems with using closures in JS.

Edit: If you look at this, it's probably best to start here: https://gitlab.com/mikekchar/testy/blob/master/design.md

I really should link that in the README...

Post reply on HN