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A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

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Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#21

Post by Bahamut »

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.

In addition, the discussion in that chat looks far from constructive...there are legitimate uses of OOP, but they are ignored completely in lieu of sweeping statements.

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#22

Post by tome »

cm3 wrote: post #13
NegativeK wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

In any case, it's mostly a joke.

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#23

Post by ebbv »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #19
ebbv wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sol…

I'm not sure how your response applies to my comment? I said that your particular job may not provide an opportunity for FP but you should still learn it for the sake of professional development.

Even if you never need a job that uses FP, you should understand it so that you understand why you don't need it in your job.

Even if you never leave your job, having those skills will help you push for a raise and move you ahead in your field.

And chances are even if your job doesn't need it now, unless you're already near retirement, eventually there will be a case where maybe it is applicable.

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#24

Post by coldtea »

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…

>At this day and age people should be familiar with multiple paradigms. Whether procedural, functional, or Object-Oriented they are all useful.

Why assume that "all are useful"?

I'd say that most of them developed ad-hoc, and whether they are useful or not is subject to actual research on their effectiveness in the field, with controlled studies etc.

Usually PL researchers go the other way around, toy with some things at the language/compiler/syntax/semantics level that think are cool/powerful/expressive etc but rarely bother with actual justification based on those that actually will use the PL, that is programmers.

Which makes the whole field cargo cultish and a pop culture, as Alan Kay notes.

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#25

Post by DubiousPusher »

jjnoakes wrote: post #16
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.

Exactly. C is a vastly smaller language than C++ but OO C is very complex with factories booking up function pointers, lots of macros, etc.

Creating an object with runtime polymorphism in C++ is much simpler.

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#26

Post by thinkpad20 »

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.

Haskell as we know it now, with high performance, large library selection, more powerful type system, advanced tooling, testing and profiling etc, has been around for significantly less time than that.

I also think that's a specious argument. Many things influence a language's popularity that have nothing to do with the language's actual value. Haskell is very idiosyncratic compared to other mainstream languages, requiring a "relearning" of a lot of skills developers take for granted. Many people balk at the learning curve and never get into it. Haskell has also received comparatively little contributions from industry and was never the pet language of a major organization (like e.g. C#, Java, Go, Rust, Dart, etc). Also the influence of Haskell can be seen in a variety of areas, from other languages adopting more advanced type systems, type classes, systems like LINQ in C#, and the increasing popularity of functional programming in general. Finally, although popularity drives language ecosystem and therefore usability, Haskell's merits purely as a language stand on its own regardless of how many people use it.

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#27

Post by TheRealPomax »

wangchow wrote: post #20
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.

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 paral…

That has never been a problem in a large part of the programming job market. If your skill set fills the job opening a big coorporation or institution has, and that job sets you up for life (instead of the frantic contract based work for startups or small companies) then exploration is a luxury, but in no way a necessity.

Note that logic applies here: I'm questioning the "you should know" claim, not claiming "you should not know" because that would be ridiculous. Learn all you like if you feel that gives you a leg up, or an enriched quality of professional life, but it is absolutely not a requirement in a well-paying part of the real world's programming landscape, so claiming "one should" is a little rich.

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#28

Post by johncolanduoni »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #19
ebbv wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sol…

I feel that case just begs the answer. You're describing a job which is defined as "don't change anything unless absolutely necessary", so it won't directly help your work to learn how to change things. This doesn't seem like a deep result about the uselessness of learning new programming paradigms.

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#29

Post by seagreen »

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.

The good haskellers I've talked to about this say Haskell has only recently become a mature language=)

The modern fast data structures packages date from 2007 to 2011 (containers, vector, text, and unordered-containers).

Recently there have been more breakthroughs like FB adoption and an unrivaled web API library in Servant (https://haskell-servant.readthedocs.io/).

Also we got Stackage and Stack recently (which ended "cabal hell"). Even "cabal hell" is gone with the new cabal-install improvements.

So don't count Haskell out too easily because it's old. It's an awesome language, but it took people a long time to figure out how to program well in it, given that it's so different from the normal way of doing things.

Re: A Conversation About OOP vs. FP Turns Constructive

#30

Post by the_duke »

coldtea wrote: post #24
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…

> At this day and age people should be familiar with multiple paradigms. Whether procedural, functional, or Object-Oriented they are all useful. Why assume that "all are useful"? I'd say that most of them developed ad-hoc, and whether they are useful or not is subject to actual research on their effectiveness in the field, with controlled studies etc. Usually PL researchers go the other way around, toy with some thin…

Being familiar with different paradigms extends your capabilities, allows you to investigate problems from different angles, and pick the solution most appropriate to the domain.

Even if you learn something 'useless' (either to the current problem or in general), it allows you to discard certain solutions, and know why they are not a good approach.

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