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

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.

> 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-...

> In any case the point is this: I had some straight imperative code that was doing the same thing several times. In order to make it generic I couldn’t just introduce a loop around the repeated code, but I had to completely change the control flow. There is too much puzzle solving here. In fact I didn’t solve this the first time I tried. In my first attempt I ended up with something far too complicated and then just left the code in the original form. Only after coming back to the problem a few days later did I come up with the simple solution above.

There are two kinds of people, I guess. To me, this description simply encapsulates the process of being a programmer. Boo hoo, you had to think a little bit and come back later to a hard problem in order to figure it out.

I'm sorry, but that's literally how every profession which requires engineering skills plays out. And like other professions, after you solve a problem once you don't have to solve the problem again. It's solved. The next template Gabriel writes in that flavor will not take nearly as long.

Seriously, all of these points he raises against FP are entirely contrived, and come across as the meaningless complaining of an uninspired programmer.

"It doesn't fit the way I think" != "I'm too stupid or lazy to figure it out".

And why should s/he do so? Between the language and the programmer, which one is the tool? Should not the tool fit the human, and not the other way around?

FP fits the way some people think. It doesn't fit the way others think. And that's fine. It's not a defect that some people think that way, and it's not a defect that some people don't.