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Functional programming should be the future of software

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Re: Functional programming should be the future of software

#241

Post by fsdjkflsjfsoij »

knaekhoved wrote: post #234
sidlls wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FP people are not bullying you, or shoving anything down your throat. Have you ever worked with a FP evangelist? Every single experience I've had has been with a person who simply won't take "no" for an answer. The impatience, ego, and pettiness is bar none, really. Aside from that, there are objective reasons to be skeptical: it's inefficient when it comes down to actual implementations that have to work on actual…

How do you distinguish between people who are in a religious fervor and people who have figured out that something is obviously beneficial?

> people who have figured out that something is obviously beneficial?

If it's so beneficial then those people can prove it by building something exceptional. I worked with Haskell and Scala for almost a decade and libraries were full of bugs and performance problems. A lot of bugs just hadn't been reported because so few people were using them. FP certainly has its strengths but so far there's very little evidence that it produces better software in the long term.

Re: Functional programming should be the future of software

#243

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

agentultra wrote: post #65
zamalek wrote: post #24

Functional programming won't succeed until the tooling problem is fixed. 'Tsoding' said it best: "developers are great at making tooling, but suck at making programming languages. Mathematicians are great at making programming languages, but suck at making tooling." This is why Rust is such a success story in my opinion: it is heavily influenced by FP, but developers are responsible for the tooling. Anecdotally, the…

I think tsoding has the wrong idea here. Most mathematicians are not working on GHC or Haskell standards or even using Haskell. Most are still doing mathematics on pen and paper. Many use packages like Sage or Wolfram alpha. Few are using interactive theorem provers like Lean. Haskell is a poor language to be doing mathematics in. I’d say the majority of people working GHC are software developers and CS researchers.…

He's talking about Programming Language Theory, which includes various type theories and such. It's where math and logic meet programming languages. In other words, the math of analyzing programing languages, not using programing languages to implement applied math.

Re: Functional programming should be the future of software

#244

Post by marcosdumay »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #232
packetlost wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the big reasons why FP languages have so little penetration is because the advocacy usually feels like someone trying to talk you into a religion. Eh, I doubt it. I've encountered a few Haskell snobs in my time, but most people that I know who use FP do so completely silently and will discuss the merits and (and challenges) with you freely. I think the real issues with FP are lack of good tooling, package ma…

"A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors". Anyone who says that - or anything anywhere close to it - is gatekeeping, no matter how true the statement is. And it's not just the statement. It seems to me (from my outside perspective) that category theory is often used in a gatekeeping way. In contrast, take SQL. How much of the mathematical theory of relations do you need to know to be able to write SQ…

Nobody says that seriously.

It tells a lot how people go for common jokes to complain about a community. It's easy to fall for that if you never actually interacted with the people.

Re: Functional programming should be the future of software

#245

Post by gjulianm »

kaba0 wrote: post #195
gjulianm wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the big reasons why FP languages have so little penetration is because the advocacy usually feels like someone trying to talk you into a religion. (The other major impediment is gatekeeping) I think one of the major reasons is because IO doesn't really fit well into the FP paradigm. All the theory and niceties take a second place when you find out that something as simple as "print a line here to console" is…

Isn’t this IO thing a bit overused? There are more FP languages that are not as pure as Haskell, but even if we only do IO through a special monad it is not too bad at all. And I say that as someone who is very much fore “practical FP” — I do think that local mutability is sometimes simply the better fit for a problem.

> there are more FP languages that are not as pure as Haskell

I mean, that's precisely the point I'm making, that IO doesn't fit into the FP paradigm and that languages that make IO easier necessarily deviate from it. And once you bring non-FP concepts into an FP language, most people will reasonably question why do that instead of the easier way, which is bringing FP concepts into imperative languages.

Re: Functional programming should be the future of software

#246

Post by wnolens »

commandlinefan wrote: post #213
le-mark wrote: post #7

It would be helpful if the article started off defining what a functional language is. A lot of languages have functional features but are not “purely” functional. I think most would agree there’s a spectrum; dynamic vs static, eager vs lazy, mutable vs immutable. So what flavor of functional programming one might ask, since javascript is a dynamically typed flavor that is ubiquitous nowadays? The fine article sugges…

> A lot of languages have functional features but are not “purely” functional. That was my first thought. I work mostly in Java because that's what they pay me to do, but I've almost never worked with a Java programmer who could actually write Java code using the OO features that the language is based around. When I see their Scala code... it's mostly var, rarely val, because it's easy to think about.

Whenever I see "interesting" object modeling beyond very basic inheritance, I groan. I've never experienced it being worth the hassle (templates, factories, etc..).

But my code is flush with collection.stream().filter().map().collect() etc. I was initially critical of it in code reviews (coming from C), but have been totally converted.

Re: Functional programming should be the future of software

#248

Post by jjuel »

toomanydoubts wrote: post #236
pfraze wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was once at a distributed systems meetup where a member of the audience interrupted the talk to give an extemporaneous presentation on why we should all be using Haskell. FP advocates have a reputation for being zealous and pretentious. The only question is whether they’re right to be.

I understand that it looks like that, but I believe most of the FP evangelists are just too excited about the cool tech and want to share it with everybody so everybody else can feel the joys of functional programming. At least that's why I often mention and talk about FP to other devs.

So like a Christian who just wants you to share the same joys of Jesus Christ that they do correct?

Re: Functional programming should be the future of software

#249

Post by andsoitis »

toomanydoubts wrote: post #236
pfraze wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was once at a distributed systems meetup where a member of the audience interrupted the talk to give an extemporaneous presentation on why we should all be using Haskell. FP advocates have a reputation for being zealous and pretentious. The only question is whether they’re right to be.

I understand that it looks like that, but I believe most of the FP evangelists are just too excited about the cool tech and want to share it with everybody so everybody else can feel the joys of functional programming. At least that's why I often mention and talk about FP to other devs.

> so everybody else can feel the joys of functional programming

That is the kind of knowing-better-than-thou that undermines the evangelism.

Re: Functional programming should be the future of software

#250

Post by anfelor »

thoradam wrote: post #235
anfelor wrote: post #158

Even though this article comes from a reputable source, it should be pointed out that the author is not a researcher in the area -- and the decision not to include various MLs, OCaml, Scala, or F# in the chart of functional languages seems controversial. So this article does not speak for the community. If you want to read more about using Functional Programming in Industry, I would recommend Yaron Minsky's https://q…

> the decision not to include various MLs, OCaml, Scala, or F# in the chart of functional languages seems controversial I don't know why that would be controversial. There's a very clear distinction between (MLs, OCaml, Scala, F#) and (Haskell, Elm, PureScript, etc.).

Sure, they are in different language families. But a chart showing the "top dozen functional-programming languages" should include all languages that were given a separate workshop at the International Conference on Functional Programming (https://icfp22.sigplan.org/): Haskell, ML, OCaml, Scheme, Erlang, miniKanren (the last two are arguably specialised enough that they could be excluded to put more focus on general-purpose languages).
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