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John Carmack on mutable variables

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498 points azhenley | 1 comments | 31 Oct 25 02:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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EastLondonCoder ◴[31 Oct 25 09:30 UTC] No.45770007[source]▶
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.

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1. m463 ◴[31 Oct 25 22:03 UTC] No.45777189[source]▶
I think a lot of this kind of stuff should have language support (like he mentions), even if it is not that functional and is just as a hint.

That said, utopias are not always a great idea. Making all your code functional might be philosophically satisfying, but sometimes there are good reasons to break the rules.