After a 2 year Clojure stint I find it very hard to explain the clarity that comes with immutability for programmers used to trigger effects with a mutation.
I think it may be one of those things you have to see in order to understand.
replies(17):
I think it may be one of those things you have to see in order to understand.
I tried to learn Haskel before but I just got bogged down in the type system and formalization - that never sat with me (ironically in retrospect Monads are a trivial concept that they obfuscated in the community to oblivion, yet another Monad tutorial was a meme at the time).
I used F# as well but it is too multi paradigm and pragmatic, I literally wrote C# in F# syntax when I hit a wall and I didn't learn as much about FP when I played with it.
Clojure had the lisp weirdness to get over, but it's homoiconicty combined with the powerful semantics of core data structures - it was the first time where the concept of working with values vs objects 'clicked' for me. I would still never use it professionally, but I would recommend it to everyone who does not have a background in FP and/or lisp experience.
On a positive note I have taken those lessons from clojure (using values, just use maps, Rich’s simplicity, functional programming without excessive type system abstraction, etc) and applied them to the rest of my programming when I can and I think it makes my code much better.