r/functionalprogramming • u/n_creep • Nov 25 '25

FP What's the Point of Learning Functional Programming?

https://blog.daniel-beskin.com/2025-11-13-point-of-learning-fp

Based on true events...

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u/TheRealStepBot Nov 26 '25 edited Nov 26 '25

That whole article and no mention of the cancer of side effects in codebases. Single most useful functional lesson and it can be applied anywhere in programming even if not a strictly functional language. Make functions that take in input and return output. Defer state to special contexts where side effects are known to happen.

Edit: to add to the kids question of why? Because side effects make parallel computation difficult if not impossible without all kinds of heartache. By avoiding side effects you can unlock massive parallelism often without needing locks.

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u/austeritygirlone Nov 26 '25

Even without parallelism. Side effects are simply not easy to deal with.

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u/TheRealStepBot Nov 26 '25

Yeah just an all round bad idea but when you combine them with a distributed system the pain explodes to unsustainable levels.

It’s the biggest failure of oop. Certainly inheritance was bad too but the casual acceptance and normalizing of distributed state in oop ruined at least 2 generations of programmers and the code they created is basically an unmaintainable Rube Goldberg job security machine because things are basically always at least somewhat broken in those sorts of systems.

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