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

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296 points gyre007 | 3 comments | 17 Oct 19 10:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.004s | source
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pnako ◴[17 Oct 19 23:21 UTC] No.21287265[source]▶
Because it's not that useful.

There is an contest organized by the International Conference on Functional Programming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICFP_Programming_Contest

It was more or less designed to show the superiority of functional programming languages. Yet in that contest C++ has done better than OCaml or Haskell...

The FP crowd seems to be more active doing advocacy than writing code. Yes, we know, there is that one trading company using OCaml. It's such a niche language that they have to pretty much maintain the toolchain and standard library themselves. Meanwhile, plenty of more successful companies use C++, C# or Java with no problem.

If you want to convince someone of the superiority of FP, write a real killer application. A new browser to compete with Chrome, a video game that can dethrone Skyrim or the Witcher 3. Maybe a DBMS that's even better than PostgreSQL? Basically: show, don't talk.

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1. iLemming ◴[18 Oct 19 03:47 UTC] No.21288479[source]▶
Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not happening.

- Have you ever heard about how Walmart handles Black Fridays?

- Do you even know what's behind Apple's payment system?

- You ever used Pandoc, Couchbase, Grammarly, CircleCI, Clubhouse.io, Pandora, Soundcloud, Spotify?

- Have you ever asked a question - what is an app like WhatsApp that was sold for $19 Billion runs on?

- or How Facebook fights spam, Cisco does malware detection or AT&T deals with abuse complains?

- How Clojure is used at NASA or how Microsoft uses Haskell?

Frankly, I don't even know what's there to debate about. Functional programming is already here and it's been used in the industry for quite awhile already and its usage growing in a quite steady pace. Almost every single programming language today has certain amount of FP idioms, either built-in or via libraries. So yeah, while you're sitting there, contemplating about if FP useful or not, people been building hundreds of awesome products.

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2. pnako ◴[18 Oct 19 04:14 UTC] No.21288622[source]▶
I said: it's not _that_ useful. I did not say it's completely useless.

Every large (or even small) company has people writing stuff in Perl, Bash, Haskell, Ruby, Rust, VBA, Scala, Lua or what not. I've been that guy, too.

More often than not it is a distraction more than anything, and it ultimately ends up being rewritten in C++, Java or Python. I think there are some niches where it helps; OCaml has had some success with static analysis and proof assistants, or even with code generation projects like FFTW.

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3. iLemming ◴[18 Oct 19 05:14 UTC] No.21288875[source]▶
Honestly, do you really think a company with only 35 engineers could build, scale and sell a product like WhatsUp for even a fraction of that amount but using C++, Java or Python? I seriously doubt that.

Look, I've seen both sides and I know this for sure (this isn't a mere opinion, this is a certain fact) - FP allows to build and maintain products using smaller teams.

You don't have to trust my word, do your research, google "companies using Clojure" (or Haskell, OCaml, Erlang, etc). You will see that either those companies are not too big, or the FP teams in large companies not very large. Skeptics often cite this fact, claiming it to be the proof that FP codebases don't scale to large teams. The truth is - you don't need a big team to build a successful product with FP language. And the number of startups using FP langs is steadily growing.