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Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

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Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#211

Post by jjav »

xamuel wrote: post #152
hyperpallium wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in maths, I find a solution in terms of the problem easier to understand than one in terms of the previous step. Even when the recursive form is a more natural representation, like arithmetic sequences: start at s , increase by d with each step: a(0) = s, a(n) = a(n-1)+d a(n) = s + n*d The analytical form seems simpler, neater, more "right" and more efficient to me - even though, if you want the whole sequence,…

>I suspect I'm just not smart enough Nah, I have a PhD in math and I agree with you completely. Imperative is way better. And most mathematicians agree with me. You can see this by cracking open any actual math or logic journal and looking how they write pseudocode (yes, pseudocode: where things like performance don't matter one tiny little bit). You'll see they're almost entirely imperative. Sometimes they even use…

Agreed. I arrived at programming through math (B.S. in Mathematics) and have no love for FP. At the end of the day all software (except hobby projects) is mostly about maintaining it. FP adds unnecessary complexity, abstraction and obfuscations. None of those qualities help code maintenance.

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#212

Post by yogthos »

flowerlad wrote: post #183

Functional programming is not new, it has been around for many decades. The reason it didn't catch on is because it doesn't map very well to how our brain works. Human brains are object oriented, so OOP is very easy to grasp. The real question is, why are people now taking a second look at functional programming. And the answer is Moore's law. Moore's law is coming to and end, and CPUs are not getting faster. Instead…

That's utter rubbish. My team has been working with Clojure for close to a decade now. We regularly hire coop students from university, and none of them have ever had problems learning functional programming. It typically takes around a couple of weeks for a student to become productive and start writing useful code. The only people I've ever met who say that FP doesn't map to the way our brains work are people who're deeply invested in imperative style and never tried anything else.

The reasons for the imperative style being dominant are largely historical. Back in the day we had single core machines with limited memory and very slow drives. Imperative style and mutability makes a lot of sense in this scenario. Today, the problem of squeezing out every last bit of performance from a single core is not the most interesting one. And we're naturally seeing more and more FP used in the wild because it's a better fit for modern problems.

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#213

Post by yogthos »

rafaelvasco wrote: post #194

I feel it's because functional programming is not a general application methodology. It excels at several idioms that we use as programmers but I feel it's something more specialized and niche then OO programming. I personally use OO as a base and iterate from there, using Functional idioms where is applicable. Some classes of programs can be described in its entirety in functional terms, but they're a small portion…

I've been working with FP for around a decade now, and anything you can express in OO can be expressed with FP just as easily and often in a much simpler and more easily maintainable fashion. I copresented a talk on how my team uses FP in our platform if you're interested in more details:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IekPZpfbdaI

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#214

Post by yogthos »

BrissyCoder wrote: post #23

People at the places I work keep memeing links to blog posts along the lines of "OOP is dead. Functional programming is the new king". Yet to see a single line of a functional language in production. As other commenters have mentioned most decent modern lanuages are multi-paradigm.

I guess you haven't really looked too hard then https://clojure.org/community/companies

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#215

Post by yogthos »

hevi_jos wrote: post #94

Because it is not the best solution for most computer problems. Simple as that. I am a functional and OOP programmer myself. I find functional way more elegant for modeling most mathematical problems, but OOP way better at modeling real life things with states. OOP and states introduce lots of problems and complexity, but the solution is not removing states, or a series of complex mathematical entelechies. In fact "r…

Having used FP for the past decades in many different domains that's huge news to me.

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#216

Post by goatlover »

blain_the_train wrote: post #117
_han wrote: post #30

The top comment on YouTube raises a valid point: > I've programmed both functional and non-functional (not necessarily OO) programming languages for ~2 decades now. This misses the point. Even if functional programming helps you reason about ADTs and data flow, monads, etc, it has the opposite effect for helping you reason about what the machine is doing. You have no control over execution, memory layout, garbage col…

Are you suggesting that oop allows programmers to understand the assembly output? Did you watch the video? The most popular language is JavaScript, which is only not functional but a quirk of history. The video makes an argument for marketing being the reason.

JS isn't really a functional language, it's an imperative, prototype-based language with partial functional support that allows multiple coding styles, like most of the popular scripting languages.

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#217

Post by goatlover »

weberc2 wrote: post #105
StreamBright wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is perfectly fine for glueing together functionality that deals with high latency systems, like a data pipeline that executes queries that are running for minutes. It does not matter from the performance point of view if this code is in Forth or Python, but it matters from the point of view how long does it take to implement and how many engineering hours need to go into it. This is why Python is a good option…

I would not advertise Python as a language with good IDE support nor package management. I fight with both of these regularly. Also, Python is reasonably suited for gluing together other high performance systems, but not everything in the world is glue code, and as soon as you need to do something O(n) on your dataset, you’re either paying an enormous performance penalty or you’re not writing that bit in Python. Peop…

> but not everything in the world is glue code, and as soon as you need to do something O(n) on your dataset, you’re either paying an enormous performance penalty or you’re not writing that bit in Python.

And yet Python has one of the richest and most widely used scientific computing stacks. If writing performant code in a friendly language is all that important, then Julia stands as a more reasonable alternative than does some functional language.

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#218

Post by flowerlad »

yogthos wrote: post #212
flowerlad wrote: post #183

Functional programming is not new, it has been around for many decades. The reason it didn't catch on is because it doesn't map very well to how our brain works. Human brains are object oriented, so OOP is very easy to grasp. The real question is, why are people now taking a second look at functional programming. And the answer is Moore's law. Moore's law is coming to and end, and CPUs are not getting faster. Instead…

That's utter rubbish. My team has been working with Clojure for close to a decade now. We regularly hire coop students from university, and none of them have ever had problems learning functional programming. It typically takes around a couple of weeks for a student to become productive and start writing useful code. The only people I've ever met who say that FP doesn't map to the way our brains work are people who'r…

I think you can do better than calling something you disagree with “rubbish” because your team didn’t have problems with it.

Here’s an example of people finding functional programming unnatural, maybe you can leverage your experience to explain why he is wrong:

Functional Programming Is Not Popular Because It Is Weird https://probablydance.com/2016/02/27/functional-programming-...

Re: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]

#220

Post by crimsonalucard »

_han wrote: post #30

The top comment on YouTube raises a valid point: > I've programmed both functional and non-functional (not necessarily OO) programming languages for ~2 decades now. This misses the point. Even if functional programming helps you reason about ADTs and data flow, monads, etc, it has the opposite effect for helping you reason about what the machine is doing. You have no control over execution, memory layout, garbage col…

With JavaScript as the most popular language out there I would say that this low level core stuff is now the fringe.
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