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John Carmack on mutable variables

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498 points azhenley | 2 comments | 31 Oct 25 02:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.632s | source
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munchler ◴[31 Oct 25 02:54 UTC] No.45767832[source]▶
> Making almost every variable const at initialization is good practice. I wish it was the default, and mutable was a keyword.

It's funny how functional programming is slowly becoming the best practice for modern code (pure functions, no side-effects), yet functional programming languages are still considered fringe tech for some reason.

If you want a language where const is the default and mutable is a keyword, try F# for starters. I switched and never looked back.

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1. Freedom2 ◴[31 Oct 25 03:02 UTC] No.45767882[source]▶
Decades of blog posts, articles and books about "best practices" led to a suspicion of anything that wasn't bog standard OOP. This site in particular has also contributed to that, especially in the early 2000s, where you can easily find comments disparaging FP.
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2. jeffreygoesto ◴[31 Oct 25 08:03 UTC] No.45769413[source]▶
I think there's a deeper mechanism in these discussions. They all tend to go "If you do <insert_arbitrary_method_here> fully correct[0], it solves all of your problems."

But [0] is never possible.