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296 points gyre007 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.514s | 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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1. StreamBright ◴[] No.21281516[source]
>> This is true for any company at scale

I do not think this is true outside your domain. Amazon uses Java, C++ and Perl. At the time I was there majority of the website code was in Perl. Amazon one of the biggest companies on the planet.

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2. hyperpallium ◴[] No.21281845[source]
Amazon needed to create AWS to be able to run all that perl performantly (joke).

Actually, a lot of programming language improvements have come from trying to make lisp performant.