This article is just describing Clojure. The SUPER principals are describing the native natural way of writing Clojure, no category theory needed.
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Functional programming accelerates agentic feature development
11–20 of 34 posts
Re: Functional programming accelerates agentic feature development
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should be better for the reasons explained in the article. Pure functions require no context to understand. If they are typed, it's even simpler. LLMs perform badly on code that has lots of state and complex semantics. Those are hard to track. In fact, synthesis of pure Haskell powered by SAT/SMT (e.g. Hoogle, Djinn, and MagicHaskeller) was already of some utility prior to the advent of LLMs. Furthermore, pure fun…
Wouldnt a fair counter argument be, that llms have been trained on way less fu ctional code though? Like they are trained on a LOT of js code -> good at js Way less functional code -> worse performance?
That's a very fair point. There are some publications showing lower performance for languages with less training data. I imagine it also applies to different paradigms. Most training code will be imperative and of lower quality.
Re: Functional programming accelerates agentic feature development
#13The article presents a function making use of global variables, declares it bad, and then proposes that the solution is functional programming.
There's nothing wrong with promoting functional programming, but the implication that all non-FP code is hard to test and/or uses global state is naive.
Re: Functional programming accelerates agentic feature development
#14This article is just describing Clojure. The SUPER principals are describing the native natural way of writing Clojure, no category theory needed.
My impression too. Most of what is in this post I've discovered almost entirely through clojure and I'm not even a clojure dev, just try to explore it in my free time. I did cmd + f in browser and searched for clojure pretty soon in to reading this.
Re: Functional programming accelerates agentic feature development
#15I've been having good luck with fairly autonomous LLM coding with the following rules:
* TypeScript everywhere with extreme enforcement of the type system.
* No "as" casts, no "any" declarations, all code must understand the shape of its data
* All boundaries validated using a typed validation library. Many use zod, I prefer tjs. I also have strictly typed pg and express wrappers.
* No files longer than 300 lines
* All of these rules are enforced by an eslint configuration that runs in a pre commit hook.
Re: Functional programming accelerates agentic feature development
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should be better for the reasons explained in the article. Pure functions require no context to understand. If they are typed, it's even simpler. LLMs perform badly on code that has lots of state and complex semantics. Those are hard to track. In fact, synthesis of pure Haskell powered by SAT/SMT (e.g. Hoogle, Djinn, and MagicHaskeller) was already of some utility prior to the advent of LLMs. Furthermore, pure fun…
Wouldnt a fair counter argument be, that llms have been trained on way less fu ctional code though? Like they are trained on a LOT of js code -> good at js Way less functional code -> worse performance?
You can write functional-style code in many languages, as I have in JS and occasionally Python to great benefit.
Re: Functional programming accelerates agentic feature development
#17Functional programming also helped get ride of bugs before, and still people used other paradigms. Why would we change now? How to know that functional programming is indeed better for vibe coding?
OP Here:
it’s not discussed in this post but in another right after I discuss the modeling I was doing on tech debt and finding the game to improve agent outcomes was reducing context.
functional programming accomplishes that. I can’t claim it’s the only way, but it’s one that’s well understood in the community
Re: Functional programming accelerates agentic feature development
#18Functional programming also helped get ride of bugs before, and still people used other paradigms. Why would we change now? How to know that functional programming is indeed better for vibe coding?
OP Here: it’s not discussed in this post but in another right after I discuss the modeling I was doing on tech debt and finding the game to improve agent outcomes was reducing context. functional programming accomplishes that. I can’t claim it’s the only way, but it’s one that’s well understood in the community
What makes is special about "agentic development" vs reducing context requirements, reducing cognitive burden, etc for human development too? "A human developer builds a mental model of a codebase over months"—yeah, that makes onboarding to a codebase very time consuming, expensive, and error-prone.
So why is "better for agents" distinct from "better for humans"?
Re: Functional programming accelerates agentic feature development
#19So glad to see someone working on making fucking coding better — making LLMs write good code, not just vibe and wow, and not just pretend the code is magic.
Re: Functional programming accelerates agentic feature development
#20I really like the “functional core, imperative shell” approach, I try to use it whenever I can. I wish more non-FP languages had a way to mark a function as pure (and have this statically enforced).