A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive • Hacker News Board

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#11

Post by SomethingOrNot » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 5:02 PM UTC

jblow wrote: post #3

nitrix wrote: post #2

A few incorrect points during the discussion as well as poorly approached. The only thing beneficial that I see from it is people trying to better their skills and Haskell gaining traction. I personally would recommend #haskell-beginners on freenode IRC as well as http://haskellbook.com for the ones interested. For everybody else, well I'm not a sale person and my job isn't to convince you. If it takes you 30 years t…

Haskell has been around for over 20 years. If it hasn't set the programming world on fire yet, there are probably reasons.

ML has been around for 40 years, but only lately have algebraic data types been catching on somewhat.

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#12

Post by ebbv » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 5:02 PM UTC

TheRealPomax wrote: post #9

wangchow wrote: post #7

At this day and age people should be familiar with multiple paradigms. Whether procedural, functional, or Object-Oriented they are all useful. This is why you see languages like C++, Java, and C# adding support for them all. It is useful to express a particular problem domain in a way that is efficient and makes sense. I would be more interested in a discussion about concurrency because it becomes more relevant acros…

realist contrarian question: why? If you didn't receive a formal education but you got good at OOP js or php, your expected salary gets pretty close to six figures. No understanding or even theoretical appreciation of other paradigms required. And I say that as someone with a formal education in programming and decent understanding of most programming paradigms.

If you are a professional developer you should always be learning and growing your skill set. You don't have to learn about functional programming, but choosing to remain ignorant does not reflect well on you.

There's a difference between learning about it and using it at work. Your job may not have any good opportunities to apply FP, but you should be learning about it in your spare time given how many great use cases it has in today's world.

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#13

Post by cm3 » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 5:02 PM UTC

NegativeK wrote: post #8

jblow wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haskell has been around for over 20 years. If it hasn't set the programming world on fire yet, there are probably reasons.

Haskell might be bad, but its unofficial slogan is "Avoid success at all costs" -- so I don't think lack of fire necessary implies it's shitty (which is I think what you were implying.)

Actually, Simon PJ clarified that it's "avoid success-at-all-costs" and not "avoid success at-all-costs".

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#14

Post by jjnoakes » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 5:04 PM UTC

TheRealPomax wrote: post #9

wangchow wrote: post #7

At this day and age people should be familiar with multiple paradigms. Whether procedural, functional, or Object-Oriented they are all useful. This is why you see languages like C++, Java, and C# adding support for them all. It is useful to express a particular problem domain in a way that is efficient and makes sense. I would be more interested in a discussion about concurrency because it becomes more relevant acros…

realist contrarian question: why? If you didn't receive a formal education but you got good at OOP js or php, your expected salary gets pretty close to six figures. No understanding or even theoretical appreciation of other paradigms required. And I say that as someone with a formal education in programming and decent understanding of most programming paradigms.

For now maybe. But I think it is short sighted to think that trend is guaranteed to continue.

Down the road, as other developers pick up different paradigms and can potentially implement the same features you are writing, with a fraction of the bugs and in a fraction of the time, why would companies keep paying you six figures?

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#15

Post by wfo » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 5:06 PM UTC

nitrix wrote: post #2

A few incorrect points during the discussion as well as poorly approached. The only thing beneficial that I see from it is people trying to better their skills and Haskell gaining traction. I personally would recommend #haskell-beginners on freenode IRC as well as http://haskellbook.com for the ones interested. For everybody else, well I'm not a sale person and my job isn't to convince you. If it takes you 30 years t…

Many people learn Haskell (or FP in general) at university and then wash their hands of it and refuse to ever touch it again. Perhaps consider it could be a matter of preference or right-tool-for-the-job rather than the fact that the unwashed peasants just haven't "discovered" enlightenment yet.

Spoken as someone who prefers FP but is not a zealot.

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#16

Post by jjnoakes » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 5:06 PM UTC

fowlerpower wrote: post #6

I really believe the future is a mixed OOP and FP world. I think we will see industry use languages like Scala and F# more and more. In mission critical portions of systems people will use a functional style and try to isolate state, while most things in an OO style will be just fine. I also believe the crazy complexity of OO languages like Java is slowly being reigned in. With other languages like Go explicitly maki…

I have no stake in pro-Go or anti-Go statements here, but I do want to say that a simple language does not always lead to simple code in that language.

For example, if one has to copy and paste because a language is too simple to provide a needed abstraction, then the code is needlessly complicated (through duplication) because the language is too simple.

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#17

Post by frozenport » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 5:07 PM UTC

ebbv wrote: post #4

This conversation is awful. This seems like a bunch of armchair developers with really strong opinions and no real world experience. No experienced developer I want to work with has the kind of dogmatic views that most of the people in this chat log have. FP and OOP are both just tools, how you use them is way more important than which tool you choose.

Indeed, for example I think that the so-called "reliability" offered by FP is can be attributed to comparable simple tasks these developers work on. It's typically some form of parsing data.

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#18

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 5:08 PM UTC

embwbam wrote: post #10

jblow wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haskell has been around for over 20 years. If it hasn't set the programming world on fire yet, there are probably reasons.

Like we only now see how bad large OO systems can be? :D. Seriously though I think that people are becoming interested in FP because they see the limitations of their current tools. That's what happened for me anyway. Also I don't know that Haskell will become mainstream, but something that looks way more like Haskell than Java will.

[deleted]

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#19

Post by TheRealPomax » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 5:09 PM UTC

ebbv wrote: post #12

TheRealPomax wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

realist contrarian question: why? If you didn't receive a formal education but you got good at OOP js or php, your expected salary gets pretty close to six figures. No understanding or even theoretical appreciation of other paradigms required. And I say that as someone with a formal education in programming and decent understanding of most programming paradigms.

If you are a professional developer you should always be learning and growing your skill set. You don't have to learn about functional programming, but choosing to remain ignorant does not reflect well on you. There's a difference between learning about it and using it at work. Your job may not have any good opportunities to apply FP, but you should be learning about it in your spare time given how many great use cas…

the real world does not particularly line up with that statement. For a fast moving contract based world, sure, but there's also the other part of the programming landscape where codebases need to be maintained forever for institutions and large companies whose idea of stable is even stricter than OpenBSD.

I know plenty of people who work on both, and the second category gets paid very good money indeed to be the sole maintainers of complex codebases, with zero need or intention to learn new approaches because it won't let them do their job any better. Does that make them less likely to get a new job? sure, unless their new job still uses the language they use right now, which when you have 20 years of experience tends to not happen - other big companies and institutions will hire you on the spot. But a more important question is: will they even get to a point where they will need to look for a new job before retiring? Chances of that are roughly zero.

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#20

Post by wangchow » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 5:11 PM UTC

TheRealPomax wrote: post #9

wangchow wrote: post #7

At this day and age people should be familiar with multiple paradigms. Whether procedural, functional, or Object-Oriented they are all useful. This is why you see languages like C++, Java, and C# adding support for them all. It is useful to express a particular problem domain in a way that is efficient and makes sense. I would be more interested in a discussion about concurrency because it becomes more relevant acros…

realist contrarian question: why? If you didn't receive a formal education but you got good at OOP js or php, your expected salary gets pretty close to six figures. No understanding or even theoretical appreciation of other paradigms required. And I say that as someone with a formal education in programming and decent understanding of most programming paradigms.

Because for those who don't understand or explore other paradigms their skillset is limited. There is a lot to be learned in concurrency domain from functional paradigms. Take a look at intel threading-building-blocks which is a modern way to look at concurrency and it is very much using functional concepts. For instance, parallel_for, parallel_reduce, parallel_scan. Reducing side-effects improves potential for parallelism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threading_Building_Blocks