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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]

#301

Post by mbo »

stillwater56 wrote: post #297
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…

I'm just starting to dabble in Scala, and as someone who has actually created lecture content, is there a resource you would particularly recommend?

New members of our team are greeted with a "Hi, my name is mbo. Here's your desk, here's your copy of The Red Book, good luck."

https://www.manning.com/books/functional-programming-in-scal...

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

#302

Post by ummonk »

dzonga wrote: post #299

as someone who made my first SPA, using Elm & met the presenter once in NY. functional programming is elegant and nice. but practicality is another different matter. for it, to be the norm, it has to have 10x advantages over the status quo. on the frontend, part JS already offers some features of functional programming, with some imperative parts. On the backend, none of the functional languages you would want to use…

I mean, on the backend functional programming usually really shines, since you're can implement your APIs using FP without needing to have any state (the FP will just be translating http requests into calls to stateful storage).

E.g. at Facebook, the PHP code I write is usually highly functional.

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

#303

Post by Mirioron »

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…

>It's had to be forced down people's throats at times, and frankly, there's no better place to force a paradigm down someone's throats than at a university, where non-compliance comes at academic penalty, and when the mind is most impressionable.

That's also a great way to make people hate it. An example is literature classes with mandatory reading and how they make students hate reading fiction.

I would also say that this might turn off more students from programming. We had functional programming in uni, where we learned Haskell. Maybe a handful of students liked it or were neutral about it, the vast majority seemed to have a negative view of it.

I think that FP is just more difficult to learn. Just look at essentially any entry level programming course and how people understand loops vs recursion.

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

#304

Post by nineteen999 »

spamizbad wrote: post #255
js8 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FP will always occupy a niche because of where it sits in the abstraction hierarchy At some point in history, people stopped worrying about not understanding compilers, how they allocate registers and handle loops and do low-level optimizations. The compilers (and languages like C or C++) became good enough (or even better than humans in many cases) in optimizing code. The same happened with managed memory and data…

Fun fact: C used to be considered a high-level language. Now everyone talks about it being "close to metal" which to olds like me is a dead give-away the person either doesn't know C or doesn't know the "metal". Most of the stuff people think of as being the "metal" in C are, in many cases, virtual abstractions created by the operating system. Embedded development w/o dynamic memory allocation less so... but that's n…

Well it depends on what side of the kernel/userspace boundary you are talking about doesn't it.

While C for userland programs may need to conform to the operating system's libc and system call interface abstractions, on the other side of the syscall boundary is C code (ie. the kernel) that is indeed very "close to the metal".

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

#305

Post by mbo »

Mirioron wrote: post #303
mbo wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It's had to be forced down people's throats at times, and frankly, there's no better place to force a paradigm down someone's throats than at a university, where non-compliance comes at academic penalty, and when the mind is most impressionable. That's also a great way to make people hate it. An example is literature classes with mandatory reading and how they make students hate reading fiction. I would also say th…

Okay, so FP is more difficult to learn. Assume for the sake of this argument that FP has a tangible benefit over other paradigms, that manifest themselves at scale. You're tasked with educating students in this paradigm, but they complain that it is more difficult than the techniques that they are used to.

What do you do?

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

#306

Post by whateveracct »

js8 wrote: post #142
_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…

> FP will always occupy a niche because of where it sits in the abstraction hierarchy At some point in history, people stopped worrying about not understanding compilers, how they allocate registers and handle loops and do low-level optimizations. The compilers (and languages like C or C++) became good enough (or even better than humans in many cases) in optimizing code. The same happened with managed memory and data…

Some engineers have terminal systems brain. That's a rude way for me to say it, but I have met engineers who feel the need to fully understand how code maps to hardware otherwise they don't feel comfortable.

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

#307

Post by Mirioron »

mbo wrote: post #305
Mirioron wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's had to be forced down people's throats at times, and frankly, there's no better place to force a paradigm down someone's throats than at a university, where non-compliance comes at academic penalty, and when the mind is most impressionable. That's also a great way to make people hate it. An example is literature classes with mandatory reading and how they make students hate reading fiction. I would also say th…

Okay, so FP is more difficult to learn. Assume for the sake of this argument that FP has a tangible benefit over other paradigms, that manifest themselves at scale. You're tasked with educating students in this paradigm, but they complain that it is more difficult than the techniques that they are used to. What do you do?

I don't know, because I'm not qualified for it. I had to pass a course on FP, but frankly, I wouldn't be able to do anything with it in practice, let alone teach it. My only personal experiences with it were negative. If it had been Haskell that was the entry level programming course, then I probably would never have learned to program.

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

#308

Post by ukj »

mbo wrote: post #305
Mirioron wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's had to be forced down people's throats at times, and frankly, there's no better place to force a paradigm down someone's throats than at a university, where non-compliance comes at academic penalty, and when the mind is most impressionable. That's also a great way to make people hate it. An example is literature classes with mandatory reading and how they make students hate reading fiction. I would also say th…

Okay, so FP is more difficult to learn. Assume for the sake of this argument that FP has a tangible benefit over other paradigms, that manifest themselves at scale. You're tasked with educating students in this paradigm, but they complain that it is more difficult than the techniques that they are used to. What do you do?

I validate your assumption against reality.

If FP is not mandatory at Google-scale, it isn’t mandatory at your scale.

The kind of problems that emerge at scale are not the kind of problems FP tackles.

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

#309

Post by ahartmetz »

mbo wrote: post #305
Mirioron wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's had to be forced down people's throats at times, and frankly, there's no better place to force a paradigm down someone's throats than at a university, where non-compliance comes at academic penalty, and when the mind is most impressionable. That's also a great way to make people hate it. An example is literature classes with mandatory reading and how they make students hate reading fiction. I would also say th…

Okay, so FP is more difficult to learn. Assume for the sake of this argument that FP has a tangible benefit over other paradigms, that manifest themselves at scale. You're tasked with educating students in this paradigm, but they complain that it is more difficult than the techniques that they are used to. What do you do?

You give them difficult real-world problems where FP is helpful.

But university computer science seems to be specialized from mathematics instead of generalized from engineering, so CS professors most of the time have no idea about real world problems. At least here in Germany, where the problem seems especially bad.

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

#310

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

The thing about these discussions is they seem to have two different questions mixed together. One question is "what's the best way to produce good software in a circumstance where everyone start on top of their game and the right thing" and the other is "what's a sort-of natural, slightly better average, way that programming can be." The answer to the first can be "Good functional Programming" or "Good OOP" or maybe something even more exotic. But it doesn't matter that much for the second question. Because usually the question of "how can this code we have already be better" mean "how do you take a general mess and make salvagable?" I don't know what the FP's answer to this is. I generally get the feel the FP people don't want to have an answer to this because then there'd be a lot of better-but-still-bad installations out there. But there are plenty answers to improvement using OOP - most say just encapsulate everything or similar things. All sorts of things can be thinly encapsulated, better, but still far from good. That seems to me explain the prevalence of OOP.
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