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

EDIT: I wrote this comment before watching the video. I stand by this comment, but the video is very good and I wholeheartedly agree with its conclusions.

As someone who writes pure FP for a living at a rather large and well known org, these threads physically hurt me. They're consistently full of bad takes from people who don't like FP, or haven't written a lick of it. Subsequently, you get judgements that are chock full of misconceptions of what FP actually is, and the pros and cons outsiders believe about FP are completely different from its practitioners. It's always some whinge about FP not mapping "to the metal", which is comical given say, Rust's derivation from what is quite functional stock.

My personal belief? We just don't teach it. Unis these days start with Python, so a lot of student's first exposure to programming is a multi-paradigm language that can't really support the higher forms of FP techniques. Sure, there may be a course that covers Haskell or a Lisp, but the majority of the teaching is conducted in C, C++, Java or Python. Grads come out with a 4 year headstart on a non-FP paradigm, why would orgs use languages and techniques that they're going to have to train new grads with from scratch?

And training people in FP is bloody time consuming. I've recorded up to 5 hours of lecture content for devs internally teaching functional Scala, which took quadruple the time to write and revise, plus the many hours in 1-on-1 contact teaching Scala and Haskell. Not a lot of people have dealt with these concepts before, and you really have to start from scratch.

I think you nailed it. But FP proponents have done a fair bit of harm to the paradigm itself in that some of the more osutspoken proponents have been pretty alienating. They've pushed the language superiority argument to death. They should probably be focused on pushing the style in the hopes that the next round of popular languages begins to implement FP style as first class features. Which is of course what the author alludes to and I think is actually happening. Which would jive with history.

A lot of what became OO language features arose because people were already using the style in non-OO languages. C being a great example of how you can use a ton of C++ like features, you best end up writing a lot of boiler plate to hook up function pointers and the like.

Going back further we see features in C were being implemented by assembly prigrammers as macro assembly. So the pattern the author puts forward has basically held true for multiple shifts in programming paradigms.

Which leaves me with one point of contention with the presenter. That OO dominance is not happenstance. And neither was the fact that lots of people were writing OO style C. There is something about OOP that helped people think about their code easier. That's why they adopted the features. Maybe not everything about it was great and we're learning that. But it genuinely helped people. Just as English language oriented languages helped people over ASM.