> I would take the FP zealots more seriously if they stopped asserting that FP makes things more correct.
Depends on the correctness requirements in question. But overall you are 100% correct about this.
FP, among other aspects, enables and promotes some ways of reasoning, for instance when mutation is avoided, that can be relatively easy to use to verify correctness of certain types of properties. For instance, induction proofs and some other kinds of mathematical proofs. However, for some other types of correctness properties, imperative programming can be easier to reason about than FP. One possible example is in regards to implementation of algorithms, where for instance an implementation of quicksort in C is likely to be more concise and clearer than a "true" quicksort implementation in Haskell. Another possible example is (if one assumes that FP requires garbage collection) that of hard real-time systems, for instance some types of medical devices, where even though some types of garbage collection may be viable, approaches like forgoing dynamic memory allocation (no malloc, no reference counting, no types of garbage collection, etc.) may be easier to reason about regarding achieving the correctness requirement of hard real-time.
Overall, I definitely agree that ML and FP are not the best for achieving correctness in all cases.
I personally like to pick and choose between FP and other approaches, and mix them in different ways dependent on the project or task at hand. Like, a purely functional interface with internal mutation in the implementation for optimization. Or, some mutable API that uses FP for some aspects of the implementation where FP is easier to reason about.
> I can tell you that debugging a compiler written in ML is a dumpster fire compared to debugging a compiler written in C++. If take C++ over any FP language for compilers any day of the week.
For larger compilers for some requirements, I could for some projects imagine that this is true. But, for smaller compilers with relatively few requirements, the pattern matching and tagged union features of modern ML languages are very popular, and I like having access to those features when writing smaller compilers.
If you do not mind spending the time to expound on this topic, I would very much like to know more. Or, maybe some links, like blog posts, that discuss this topic. I am genuinely curious. A blog post could also be shared elsewhere, instead of just lost in some Hacker News discussion. (Maybe I should start blogging myself).
Also, Hacker News/Ycombinator is censorship-infested.