Everything Is Just Functions: 1 week with David Beazley and SICP

Warning: Diving into SCIP/Lisp/Scheme can transform how you think about programming... food for thought is always welcomed! But applying those ideas wholesale to OOP codebases often backfires or gets pushback from teammates. Languages handle paradigms differently, and going against the grain usually leads to worse code.

Example: After Lisp, you might replace every for loop with forEach or chain everything through map/reduce. But unless you’re working in a language that fully embraces functional programming, this approach can hurt both readability and performance.

At the end of the day, it’s grounding to remember there’s mutable memory and a CPU processing the code. These days, I find data-oriented design and “mechanical sympathy” (aligning code with hardware realities) more practical day-to-day than more abstract concepts like Church numerals.

The thing is, I find immutable is safer. Less side effects is more predictable. OO is used often when things can just be functions. I love gamedev, and OO makes a lot of sense there because all of the computations and unsafe code is kind of okay. But for webdev FP makes so much more sense. For SAAS something like elixir enables me to write more reliable / less buggy / better tested code.

If I could get one wish, it would be to ban "makes sense" from any engineering discussion ever. Facts do not "make sense" the world is not a "sense making" machine. We make sense of the world and of the facts. Something feeling intuitive, which is what people often mean when they claim something "makes sense", just means it slots into your existing experience.