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

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296 points gyre007 | 2 comments | 17 Oct 19 10:10 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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1. TulliusCicero ◴[17 Oct 19 15:56 UTC] No.21283371[source]▶
This is correct. Everyone I've met that insisted that functional programming is superior to imperative has been a big time math/CS nerd, the kind that goes to grad school and was confused when the iPad launched because hey it does nothing that a laptop doesn't already do!

My experience doing functional programming is that hurt my brain, it just doesn't map as cleanly to how I think of things happening compared to imperative programming. It was just really painful to code in, and most of my classmates had the same opinion.

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2. Hercuros ◴[18 Oct 19 22:47 UTC] No.21295672[source]▶
It’s mostly a matter of practice. I think that many people’s experience of functional programming is a (potentially poorly-taught) university course, during which there is not really enough time to really become comfortable with functional programming. Maybe it’s true that the learning curve is a bit (a lot?) steeper, though. But once you are comfortable with it, it’s not significantly more difficult than writing code in Java or Python. I also think that it’s worth learning even just for the sake of becoming a better programmer. It teaches you to think in a different way, which also translates to programming in imperative languages.