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

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296 points gyre007 | 9 comments | 17 Oct 19 10:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.219s | source | bottom
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lewisjoe ◴[17 Oct 19 10:57 UTC] No.21280702[source]▶
Richard Gabriel’s famous essay “Worse is better” (https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html) is an interesting perspective on why Lisp lost to C. In a way, the same arguments (simplicity vs consistency vs correctness vs completeness) can be made for why functional programming lost to OOP.

But those philosophical perspectives aside, personally I find my brain works very much like a Turing Machine, when dealing with complex problems. Apart from my code, even most of my todos are simple step-by-step instructions to achieve something. It’s easily understandable why like me, other non-math folks would prefer a Turing Machine over Lambda Calculus’ way of writing instructions.

This could be why OOP/Imperative was often preferred over FP.

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strangenessak ◴[17 Oct 19 11:19 UTC] No.21280835[source]▶
> personally I find my brain works very much like a Turing Machine

Exactly this. How baking a cake in FP looks like:

* A cake is a hot cake that has been cooled on a damp tea towel, where a hot cake is a prepared cake that has been baked in a preheated oven for 30 minutes.

* A preheated oven is an oven that has been heated to 175 degrees C.

* A prepared cake is batter that has been poured into prepared pans, where batter is mixture that has chopped walnuts stirred in. Where mixture is butter, white sugar and brown sugar that has been creamed in a large bowl until light and fluffy

Taken from here: https://probablydance.com/2016/02/27/functional-programming-...

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1. chii ◴[17 Oct 19 11:46 UTC] No.21280977[source]▶
but now that you've written the cake baking data type, with a little small tweak, you've got a bread baking data type.
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2. missosoup ◴[17 Oct 19 11:49 UTC] No.21280999[source]▶
I'll find it more intuitive to do both as an imperative series of steps.

Some of my friends are in love with FP. I am not. I've done more FP than most, I can work with it, but my brain has never become in tune with it. I can bang out my intent as imperative code in real time, but with FP I have to stop and think to translate.

FP also means that I can't always easily tell the runtime complexity of what I'm writing and there's a complex black box between my code and the metal.

Maybe some of my friends' brains are superior and can think in FP, all the more power to them. but empirical evidence is that most people are not capable of that, so FP will probably forever remain in the shadow of imperative programming.

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3. jacobush ◴[17 Oct 19 11:50 UTC] No.21281014[source]▶
Haha, that sounds like the C++ inheritance joke.
4. Torwald ◴[17 Oct 19 11:54 UTC] No.21281037[source]▶
I'd rather have a baking class that takes an argument for what I want to bake, either bread or cake, and spares me the details of how baking is done. I don't have to know that a preheated oven is one that is at 175 grades etc
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5. TomMarius ◴[17 Oct 19 12:14 UTC] No.21281162[source]▶
But then your cake might easily burn.
6. pas ◴[17 Oct 19 12:17 UTC] No.21281188[source]▶
Do you think of types and transformations between types when you write imperative code?

I mean usually the problem in FP is that you simply can't type mutation (you'd have to use dependent types and so on), okay, so use immutability, great, but then every "step" is just some franken-type-partial-whatever. And TypeScript has great support for these (first of all it infers a lot, but you can use nice type combinators to safeguard that you get what you wanted).

I don't like pure FP exactly because of this, because many times you have to use some very complicated constellation of concepts to be able to represent a specific data flow / computation / transformation / data structure. Whereas in TS / Scala you just have a nice escape hatch.

7. marvin ◴[17 Oct 19 12:33 UTC] No.21281317[source]▶
True, but what if you never wanted bread?
8. EpicEng ◴[17 Oct 19 14:50 UTC] No.21282646[source]▶
And when your oven has a problem with it's heating element you'll have no idea why your cake didn't turn out well. We're supposed to be engineers, right? Learning how things work is good.
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9. Torwald ◴[19 Oct 19 16:49 UTC] No.21299373{3}[source]▶
My comment was supposed to be a joke about the vernacular in which OO tends to get presented.