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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]

#311

Post by ummonk »

classified wrote: post #178
skohan wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does OCaml give you enough tools to optimize around things like CPU-cache and memory management costs? It's one thing to know what kind of assembly is going to be produced by a block of code, but it's another thing to be able to get the machine to do exactly what you want.

If “to get the machine to do exactly what you want” is an important goal, I'd recommend C or C++. Those are well known tools for those purposes. FP languages are rather about getting more ideas from math into how you structure your code.

Rust on the other hand is zero-cost abstraction but pushes you to write functional code.

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

#312

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#313

Post by ummonk »

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.

Is the kind of HFT that Jane Street does that reliant on extremely low latency? A lot of HFT firms operate on the timescale of seconds, minutes, or even hours, not milliseconds.

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

#314

Post by paulddraper »

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…

What are the best OOP languages? Smalltalk?

For FP I would reply Haskell/PureScript, OCaml, and Scheme.

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

#315

Post by ummonk »

nybble41 wrote: post #229
cr0sh wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fun, and funny, and maybe (probably) even terrible, thing about javascript is that while it -is- functional, and (IIRC) always has been, historically it wasn't originally used that way! Only relatively recently have programmers embraced its functional aspects; prior to that it was mostly used as a procedural language. Then people started to used functional aspects of it to "shoehorn" it into allowing a quasi-OOP…

> Oh - and why not pass a function in and return one back The "function" in "functional programming" is a reference to mathematical functions. Mathematical functions do not have side effects, and consequently are referentially transparent (the result doesn't depend on the evaluation order or on how many times the function is evaluated). Code with side effects is not a function in the mathematical sense, it's a proced…

You could write pure code in JS. You'd just need a linter to enforce it.

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

#316

Post by lazulicurio »

senderista wrote: post #292
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…

I think the Smalltalk paradigm is deeply defective and the Actor model (the purest form of OOP to my mind) remedies most of its faults but perpetuates some others. A few flaws: - Modeling all communication as synchronous message-passing. Some communication (such as evaluating mathematical functions) is naturally modeled as synchronous procedure calls, while communication which is naturally modeled as message-passing…

There was an article on state in OOP posted here a few days ago that I found very thought-provoking[1]. The blog post and related youtube videos are pretty interesting as well[2][3][4].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21238802

[2] https://medium.com/@brianwill/object-oriented-programming-a-...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRTfhkiAqPw

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

#317

Post by ummonk »

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,…

This doesn't look to me like the difference between functional and imperative so much as the difference between recursion / iteration and map / list comprehension.

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

#318

Post by ummonk »

cryptica wrote: post #115

OOP was designed to prioritize encapsulation at the expense of referential transparency. Functional programming was designed to prioritize referential transparency at the expense of encapsulation. You cannot have referential transparency and encapsulation at the same time. In order to prevent mutations (which is a requirement of FP), a module cannot hold any state internally; this necessarily means that the state mus…

In my view, the new hooks paradigm in React combines the best of both worlds in FP and OOP.

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

#319

Post by gambler »

paulddraper wrote: post #314
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…

What are the best OOP languages? Smalltalk? For FP I would reply Haskell/PureScript, OCaml, and Scheme.

I don't know what's the best OOP language right now, but Pharo is pretty enjoyable to work with.

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

#320

Post by caseymarquis »

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…

This makes me appreciate working somewhere that feels kids' soccer games will always take precedence over merging features. I also use hybrid actors/oop extensively. I'd never really considered that these probably go hand in hand.
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