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296 points gyre007 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.271s | source
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mbo ◴[] No.21286487[source]
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.

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stillwater56 ◴[] No.21287544[source]
I'm just starting to dabble in Scala, and as someone who has actually created lecture content, is there a resource you would particularly recommend?
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1. mbo ◴[] No.21287603[source]
New members of our team are greeted with a "Hi, my name is mbo. Here's your desk, here's your copy of The Red Book, good luck."

https://www.manning.com/books/functional-programming-in-scal...