At least on mobile, it’s not clear where the blogger’s introduction ends and Carmack’s reproduced post begins. 5 years late to mention it, though. Great article.
John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ (2018)
11–20 of 179 posts
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ (2018)
#12This should probably have 2012 (instead of 2018) in the title.
[1] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/in-depth-functiona...
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ (2018)
#13He talked about it a bit during his lex friedman interview. He said he spent some time there, IIRC, and found it somewhat intriguing, perhaps interesting, but needed to get shit done eventually and so stopped his investigation. Very pragmatic. From what I can see in this article he mostly seemed to like the purity aspect of FP. It seems to me like a number of FP concepts aren’t really “FP things”, as Carmack points o…
> but needed to get shit done eventually and so stopped his investigation. Very pragmatic.
That's a strange take by him and on pragmatism. There's also almost nothing pragmatic about C++. Many functional languages are actually quite pragmatic.
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ (2018)
#14best article i've seen on pragmatic purity - i would only dissent on c++ not providing facilities for pure functions (i don't here mean pure in the virtual=0 sense) - you can, and should, do quite a lot.
There is one place where purity is effectively enforced: constexpr functions called in constexpr context.
It's a little bit limited, as it's only enforced for compile time evaluations.
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ (2018)
#15best article i've seen on pragmatic purity - i would only dissent on c++ not providing facilities for pure functions (i don't here mean pure in the virtual=0 sense) - you can, and should, do quite a lot.
The language does not offer the features that you were referring to, and that the author of the article mentions. You can write pure functions, but the purity is not checked by the compiler, that is what has been meant here.
For example declaring function of the class as const pretty much turns it into pure function and compiler makes sure that it does not modify state of said class. So you are wrong from a practical standpoint. try to modify state of the class inside const function and it'll be compiler error.
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ (2018)
#16He talked about it a bit during his lex friedman interview. He said he spent some time there, IIRC, and found it somewhat intriguing, perhaps interesting, but needed to get shit done eventually and so stopped his investigation. Very pragmatic. From what I can see in this article he mostly seemed to like the purity aspect of FP. It seems to me like a number of FP concepts aren’t really “FP things”, as Carmack points o…
> but needed to get shit done eventually and so stopped his investigation. Very pragmatic. That's a strange take by him and on pragmatism. There's also almost nothing pragmatic about C++. Many functional languages are actually quite pragmatic.
> There's also almost nothing pragmatic about C++.
Huh? We’re talking about game dev. C or C++ is the primary language for just about every game engine ever. Even Unity is written C++.
I can’t say functional languages haven’t ever shipped a game. I’m sure there’s an example or three.
But yeah when it comes to shipping games C++ is the definition of pragmatic.
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ (2018)
#17FP to me is more about abstract the functionality, or generalize functionalities.
OOP is about abstract the mesaging.
When your object is just a pure function, you achive the ultimate abstraction.
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ (2018)
#18He talked about it a bit during his lex friedman interview. He said he spent some time there, IIRC, and found it somewhat intriguing, perhaps interesting, but needed to get shit done eventually and so stopped his investigation. Very pragmatic. From what I can see in this article he mostly seemed to like the purity aspect of FP. It seems to me like a number of FP concepts aren’t really “FP things”, as Carmack points o…
>He said he spent some time there, IIRC, and found it somewhat intriguing, perhaps interesting, but needed to get shit done eventually and so […]
I think this resonates with many. My take is: don’t be dogmatic. Regardless of the language, one should write as beautiful, composable and pure as possible - but no more than that. Where only performance matters, oop wins. When clarity is the only priority, Haskell wins. But in reality, we’re rarely dealing with either scenario. We’re somewhere in the noisy realm between, and ought to code accordingly. Fundamentalists rarely make policy with the nuance reality deserves.
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ (2018)
#19He talked about it a bit during his lex friedman interview. He said he spent some time there, IIRC, and found it somewhat intriguing, perhaps interesting, but needed to get shit done eventually and so stopped his investigation. Very pragmatic. From what I can see in this article he mostly seemed to like the purity aspect of FP. It seems to me like a number of FP concepts aren’t really “FP things”, as Carmack points o…
In the same interview he also mentions using python a lot lately and making the point that for the vast majority of code, performance really doesn't matter and productivity is more important.
Reading this article, he's making a great argument for Rust. I assume the article predates rust by quite a bit. But basically Rust is not a pure functional language but still has a lot of elements in the language that add purity and rigidity. It allows you to do low level stuff when you need to but at the same time promotes safety and correctness.
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ (2018)
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but needed to get shit done eventually and so stopped his investigation. Very pragmatic. That's a strange take by him and on pragmatism. There's also almost nothing pragmatic about C++. Many functional languages are actually quite pragmatic.
> There's also almost nothing pragmatic about C++. Huh? We’re talking about game dev. C or C++ is the primary language for just about every game engine ever. Even Unity is written C++. I can’t say functional languages haven’t ever shipped a game. I’m sure there’s an example or three. But yeah when it comes to shipping games C++ is the definition of pragmatic.
The word game appears twice in all the articles, so I took this writing as a broad outlook. And C++ is not C.
Just because C++ ships games doesn't make it pragmatic. Aren't many game codebases considered to be absolute hell? And none of that says anything about the pragmatism of functional-first languages.