21–30 of 146 posts
It's not even biased towards Haskell; it's biased towards working at Slamdata, where they abuse free monads for everything.
When you write Javascript and use first class functions (ideally without side-effects, but who the fuck really cares), that's functional programming.
Tired of this elitism.
The other is to ignore any insult, intended, perceived, or a mix of both, ignore all the hierarchy labeling - 'beginner', 'advanced beginner', "standard ladder" etc who tf cares? - and just see if there are skills you can pick up or explore on your own.
That said, I laughed at 'equational reasoning' being considered an 'expert skill'. It is considered an advanced technique but imo the basics are trivial to pick up, and I had a lecture/demo on this at a local fp conf. Sure it can get very hard if you tackle a hard problem, but that is true for everything.
One way to process this list is to see it as an elitist construct intended to put you down or degrade you or extract money from you for training etc.(which might even be true, but generally it is better, ime, to assume that people are genuinely trying to provide what they see as value) The other is to ignore any insult, intended, perceived, or a mix of both, ignore all the hierarchy labeling - 'beginner', 'advanced b…
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Pearls-Functional-Algorithm-Design-Ri...
Some complaints about this list: 1. This list is very Haskell-focused: it includes lots of features which only make sense in Haskell or very Haskell-like languages, and lacks mention of many interesting functional programming concepts which don't appear in Haskell (like ML-style modules and functors, row types, macro systems and homoiconicity, and so forth.) There are a lot of functional languages which have very dif…
I like this idea a lot
Most useless thing ever created for functional programming anything. It's not even biased towards Haskell; it's biased towards working at Slamdata, where they abuse free monads for everything. When you write Javascript and use first class functions (ideally without side-effects, but who the fuck really cares), that's functional programming. Tired of this elitism.
Some of this stuff is cool and interesting, even to me -- but please don't rank people based on their inferiority of knowledge WRT to you, as you are explicitly doing
It's funny to see that singleton types are within the highest level: 'expert'. While in Typescript they're, together with union types, the most intuïtive thing ever. I guess that's because to express them in a language that doesn't have native support requires advanced deftness in typelevel programming. Like f.i. implementing them yourself in Scala 2.x. So I expect the coolness factor of singleton types and union typ…
wrong "singletons" http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16017294/singleton-types-... Singletons are a way to emulate dependent types with typeclasses, datakinds, and GADTs
One way to process this list is to see it as an elitist construct intended to put you down or degrade you or extract money from you for training etc.(which might even be true, but generally it is better, ime, to assume that people are genuinely trying to provide what they see as value) The other is to ignore any insult, intended, perceived, or a mix of both, ignore all the hierarchy labeling - 'beginner', 'advanced b…
In response only to the third point, there are some very nice examples of "advanced" equational reasoning in the work of Richard Bird. Pearls of Functional Algorithm Design [0] is a great book for exploring this and demonstrates a very "expert" nature. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Pearls-Functional-Algorithm-Design-Ri...
It says something slightly worrisome about the functional paradigm that "profile, debug, and optimize purely functional code with minimal sacrifice" is considered an expert-level skill.
I get the sense that most engineers would almost never use, and never need to use, most things beyond advanced-beginner in this sheet. It may be fun to brag about knowing how to use "embedded DSL with combinators," but is that really the best thing to help your startup succeed? I suppose I'm slightly bothered by the fetishizing of challenging knowledge for challenge sake. Most of the people I know who learn about "Em…
A lot of these techniques are things that take a bit more up-front effort but pay off over the long (or even medium) term. I think that's why it might make people seem less productive—although of course a lot depends on your perspective and experience. Measuring productivity is an open problem in software engineering and, in my experience, people's intuitions about it are all over the board, which means that nobody's…
My experience has been (31, SF) that companies are fundamentally disorganized, frequently reinvent things (a behavior seen at all levels), are skewed by politics, and ultimately are rarely successful due to the code. The fact is, that for most startups it's not the code that's make-or-break (twitter, snapchat, facebook, airbnb, uber), it's the business execution.
It's been my career experience that the only way to be a 10x engineer is to prevent management from engaging in unnecessary projects (Bob wants to rewrite X in node, Joe wants to make a service that only has the responsibility of CRUD to 1 table, Sally wants to move it all to noSql). It's been my career experience that soft skills give the best ROI.
So when I see a list like this, I find it hard to imagine how "Profunctor Optics" is what Zynga (or any company I've worked at) needed to be successful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of these techniques are things that take a bit more up-front effort but pay off over the long (or even medium) term. I think that's why it might make people seem less productive—although of course a lot depends on your perspective and experience. Measuring productivity is an open problem in software engineering and, in my experience, people's intuitions about it are all over the board, which means that nobody's…
Well, I can't speak to your career experience, but I can speak to mine. My experience has been (31, SF) that companies are fundamentally disorganized, frequently reinvent things (a behavior seen at all levels), are skewed by politics, and ultimately are rarely successful due to the code. The fact is, that for most startups it's not the code that's make-or-break (twitter, snapchat, facebook, airbnb, uber), it's the bu…
I mean, by that criteria, why learn anything?
The world is not just startups btw, I work on products that have very very defined requirements. Hell, sometimes I'm implementing an RFC. FP is a huge win for us, and yes i've used profunctor optics in a high performance network application.