Functional programming is finally going mainstream
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Re: Functional programming is finally going mainstream
#2Functional programming with immutable state cannot possibly win in the general case.
There are two truths that ensure the dominance of imperative software:
1. At some level of software complexity, programmers MUST start to organize data into composite objects. They have to do this because working outside of well-defined problem domains is a recipe for buggy software and spaghetti code.
2. Copying memory around to enable to facilitate these immutable structures is SLOW.
Re: Functional programming is finally going mainstream
#3Functional programming with immutable state cannot possibly win in the general case. There are two truths that ensure the dominance of imperative software: 1. At some level of software complexity, programmers MUST start to organize data into composite objects. They have to do this because working outside of well-defined problem domains is a recipe for buggy software and spaghetti code. 2. Copying memory around to ena…
Are you considering the speed of persistent data structures, that have the same big-O as their mutable counterparts? [0]
Re: Functional programming is finally going mainstream
#4Functional programming with immutable state cannot possibly win in the general case. There are two truths that ensure the dominance of imperative software: 1. At some level of software complexity, programmers MUST start to organize data into composite objects. They have to do this because working outside of well-defined problem domains is a recipe for buggy software and spaghetti code. 2. Copying memory around to ena…
1. Mainstream FP languages have modules and OOP support as well.
2. Immutable structures aren't immutable at the runtime level, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure
Re: Functional programming is finally going mainstream
#5Functional programming with immutable state cannot possibly win in the general case. There are two truths that ensure the dominance of imperative software: 1. At some level of software complexity, programmers MUST start to organize data into composite objects. They have to do this because working outside of well-defined problem domains is a recipe for buggy software and spaghetti code. 2. Copying memory around to ena…
> 2. Copying memory ...
the entire point of some of the immutable structures is hidden in their implementations, such that they are fast exactly because they do NOT copy unnecessarily. the side effect gets called "functional", so there's a strange reversal of importance of (kinda misleading) buzzwords at play here.
The link(s) the others shared is a great article.
Re: Functional programming is finally going mainstream
#6Functional programming with immutable state cannot possibly win in the general case. There are two truths that ensure the dominance of imperative software: 1. At some level of software complexity, programmers MUST start to organize data into composite objects. They have to do this because working outside of well-defined problem domains is a recipe for buggy software and spaghetti code. 2. Copying memory around to ena…
Ah, but you don't always have to copy memory around to facilitate immutable datastructures. Koka lang and Roc lang are at the forefront of a functional-but-in-place (FBIP) style of memory management that use hyper-fast ref-counting and if a function owns the sole reference to a datastructure can mutably modify it instead of deallocating & reallocating.
The most recent Perceus reference counting paper, implemented in Koka, had Koka's functional and persistent Red-Black tree 10% faster than the handwritten C++ version (std::map) [0], and the Roc language has a purely functional quicksort version competitive with standard imperative languages.
So it seems we can have out cake and eat it too!
[0] - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2021/1...
Re: Functional programming is finally going mainstream
#7Functional programming with immutable state cannot possibly win in the general case. There are two truths that ensure the dominance of imperative software: 1. At some level of software complexity, programmers MUST start to organize data into composite objects. They have to do this because working outside of well-defined problem domains is a recipe for buggy software and spaghetti code. 2. Copying memory around to ena…
Are you considering the speed of persistent data structures, that have the same big-O as their mutable counterparts? [0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure
Algorithmic complexity isn't the same as speed.
Re: Functional programming is finally going mainstream
#8Functional programming with immutable state cannot possibly win in the general case. There are two truths that ensure the dominance of imperative software: 1. At some level of software complexity, programmers MUST start to organize data into composite objects. They have to do this because working outside of well-defined problem domains is a recipe for buggy software and spaghetti code. 2. Copying memory around to ena…
Ah, but you don't always have to copy memory around to facilitate immutable datastructures. Koka lang and Roc lang are at the forefront of a functional-but-in-place (FBIP) style of memory management that use hyper-fast ref-counting and if a function owns the sole reference to a datastructure can mutably modify it instead of deallocating & reallocating. The most recent Perceus reference counting paper, implemented in…
Koka-lang and Roc-lang? What are those?
Re: Functional programming is finally going mainstream
#9Side note, GitHub's URL scheme is so counter-intuitive.
I spent the first 10s wondering who this readme user was and how could they have such a different main page.
Then there's the orgs at the same level as users...
Re: Functional programming is finally going mainstream
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, but you don't always have to copy memory around to facilitate immutable datastructures. Koka lang and Roc lang are at the forefront of a functional-but-in-place (FBIP) style of memory management that use hyper-fast ref-counting and if a function owns the sole reference to a datastructure can mutably modify it instead of deallocating & reallocating. The most recent Perceus reference counting paper, implemented in…
Koka-lang and Roc-lang? What are those?
https://koka-lang.github.io/koka/doc/index.html
Both working on making functional programming practical and very fast. Koka is more of a research language, also developing Algebraic Effects and making them practical, which is very cool.