Functional Programming at Facebook
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Functional Programming at Facebook
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Re: Functional Programming at Facebook
#2Well also WhatsApp handling 1B+ users with Erlang, and with (what used to be?) only a handful of engineers.
But somehow the Haskell, OCaml and Scala users never want to include Erlang when talking about "functional". Even though it is probably the most practically used functional language.
Re: Functional Programming at Facebook
#3Well also WhatsApp handling 1B+ users with Erlang, and with (what used to be?) only a handful of engineers. But somehow the Haskell, OCaml and Scala users never want to include Erlang when talking about "functional". Even though it is probably the most practically used functional language.
Because there's functional as in only using pure functions (Haskell, ocaml) and functional as in access to higher order functions (JavaScript, erlang, clojure)
Re: Functional Programming at Facebook
#4Well also WhatsApp handling 1B+ users with Erlang, and with (what used to be?) only a handful of engineers. But somehow the Haskell, OCaml and Scala users never want to include Erlang when talking about "functional". Even though it is probably the most practically used functional language.
In part, this is due to Haskell et al. are statically typed, which provides a higher safety guarantee than dynamically typed languages like erlang.
Re: Functional Programming at Facebook
#5Well also WhatsApp handling 1B+ users with Erlang, and with (what used to be?) only a handful of engineers. But somehow the Haskell, OCaml and Scala users never want to include Erlang when talking about "functional". Even though it is probably the most practically used functional language.
Because there's functional as in only using pure functions (Haskell, ocaml) and functional as in access to higher order functions (JavaScript, erlang, clojure)
> Because there's functional as in only using pure functions (Haskell, ocaml)
This is not true. Having written a good amount of OCaml I would argue that programming with side-effects in OCaml is extremely approachable - almost as much as Clojure. There are mutable data structures in the stdlib (Array, Hashtbl) and IO etc. is straightforward. Like Clojure, there exists a ref type which can be easily mutated. It's one of the reasons why OCaml strikes as an extremely pragmatic language to me.
Re: Functional Programming at Facebook
#6Well also WhatsApp handling 1B+ users with Erlang, and with (what used to be?) only a handful of engineers. But somehow the Haskell, OCaml and Scala users never want to include Erlang when talking about "functional". Even though it is probably the most practically used functional language.
In part, this is due to Haskell et al. are statically typed, which provides a higher safety guarantee than dynamically typed languages like erlang.
Although this reason sounds plausible, it is quite surprising since one of the first functional languages - Lisp was dynamically typed.
Re: Functional Programming at Facebook
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because there's functional as in only using pure functions (Haskell, ocaml) and functional as in access to higher order functions (JavaScript, erlang, clojure)
> Because there's functional as in only using pure functions (Haskell, ocaml) This is not true. Having written a good amount of OCaml I would argue that programming with side-effects in OCaml is extremely approachable - almost as much as Clojure. There are mutable data structures in the stdlib (Array, Hashtbl) and IO etc. is straightforward. Like Clojure, there exists a ref type which can be easily mutated. It's one…
leaving runtime asides, which do you enjoy more Ocaml or Clojure?
Re: Functional Programming at Facebook
#8Well also WhatsApp handling 1B+ users with Erlang, and with (what used to be?) only a handful of engineers. But somehow the Haskell, OCaml and Scala users never want to include Erlang when talking about "functional". Even though it is probably the most practically used functional language.
Because there's functional as in only using pure functions (Haskell, ocaml) and functional as in access to higher order functions (JavaScript, erlang, clojure)
i thought ocaml ain't pure like that?
Re: Functional Programming at Facebook
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because there's functional as in only using pure functions (Haskell, ocaml) This is not true. Having written a good amount of OCaml I would argue that programming with side-effects in OCaml is extremely approachable - almost as much as Clojure. There are mutable data structures in the stdlib (Array, Hashtbl) and IO etc. is straightforward. Like Clojure, there exists a ref type which can be easily mutated. It's one…
leaving runtime asides, which do you enjoy more Ocaml or Clojure?
I use both, for different things. Clojure is more easily concurrent, and I love ClojureScript, so I tend to use it for web applications. OCaml is extremely useful for native code (I write a lot of personal productivity tools in OCaml).
Re: Functional Programming at Facebook
#10Well also WhatsApp handling 1B+ users with Erlang, and with (what used to be?) only a handful of engineers. But somehow the Haskell, OCaml and Scala users never want to include Erlang when talking about "functional". Even though it is probably the most practically used functional language.
The feature set of Facebook is much more complicated than WhatsApp. Most of WhatsApps features come out of the box with ejabberd too (which is what they used in the beginning). Is it really a fair comparison?