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296 points gyre007 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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_han ◴[] No.21281004[source]
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 collection, you name it. FP will always occupy a niche because of where it sits in the abstraction hierarchy. I'm a real time graphics programmer and if I can't mentally map (in rough terms, specific if necessary) what assembly my code is going to generate, the language is a non-starter. This is true for any company at scale. FP can be used at the fringe or the edge, but the core part demands efficiency.

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mannykannot ◴[] No.21281366[source]
OK, but dismissing most of the things that people use computers for as "the fringe" is rather parochial.
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1. gameswithgo ◴[] No.21281434[source]
I think he means more "the outer layers". For instance Alpha Go was written in Python at the outer layers. The core pieces doing the actual neural net work are low level libraries.

Similarly, google search, at the outer most layers, is javascript, then probably some layer of Go or similar, but then the core is highly tuned C++ and assembler.