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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: 0.432s | source
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_han ◴[17 Oct 19 11:49 UTC] 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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Ragib_Zaman ◴[17 Oct 19 12:31 UTC] No.21281291[source]▶
Perhaps not a satisfactory response but when I start drifting towards thinking FP is fundamentally not as performant as _whatever_else_, I remember that Jane Street uses OCaml basically from top to bottom, and they certainly can't be too slow... Some black magic going on there.
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1. ummonk ◴[18 Oct 19 01:09 UTC] No.21287795[source]▶
Is the kind of HFT that Jane Street does that reliant on extremely low latency? A lot of HFT firms operate on the timescale of seconds, minutes, or even hours, not milliseconds.
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2. thedufer ◴[18 Oct 19 12:20 UTC] No.21290710[source]▶
I feel like there must be terminology confusion here - the HF in HFT stands for high frequency, which effectively means low latency. There may be HFT firms that additionally do slower stuff, but no one would call a trade on the timescale of hours HFT - it's a fuzzy line, but certainly nothing measured in units larger than microseconds would qualify to someone in the industry, and the line is likely lower than that.