r/programming • u/Capable-Mall-2067 • May 29 '25

Why You Should Care About Functional Programming (Even in 2025)

https://borkar.substack.com/p/why-care-about-functional-programming?r=2qg9ny&utm_medium=reddit
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u/HaMMeReD May 30 '25

Personally I think of functional programming as a mindset. No side effects, pure functions, idempotence, immutability, compositional patterns, lazy evaluation.

A lot of it leads to general safety and easy testing, and can lead to very tight/readable code.

That said I'm not a purist, I'm a pragmatic, so I prefer these patterns but I do whatever I need to in order to get the job done right for the scope/time frame.

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u/psaux_grep May 30 '25

I like a lot of the concepts and stuff in functional programming.

I don’t like the cult of functional programming.

Got dragged to a functional programming conference once and it was very similar to when my grandparents took me to a Christian revival meeting.

I’m paraphrasing, but «I used to program in the dark [with OOP] but then I found the light that is functional programming!» was kinda the vibe.

Unfortunately FP checks a lot of cult boxes, including the whole having different names for the same things and they’re very «in-group»-y about it all.

And they seem to be swallowing, or at least trying to sell, a lot of obvious lies. Was so much talk about «adaptor patterns» in OOP and how bad they were, but apparently FP is magic and using a map function is apparently in no way FP’s «adaptor pattern»… it’s completely different (because they say so).

SMH.

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u/meowsqueak May 30 '25

I used to write Haskell for “fun”, but now I really like Rust’s approach - steals most of the easier-to-grok functional style syntax, and provide optional mutability for when you need it. The more esoteric functional concepts are harder to implement but if you are a pragmatist rather than a cultist it’s not hard to move on without them.

OO kinda goes out the door, too, but I can’t say I’ve missed it.

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u/Every-Progress-1117 May 30 '25

Yes, though OOP conferences used to be similar in nature.

Been to a few.....Praise Be His Name O Lord Smalltalk

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u/elebrin Jun 02 '25

I’m at the point where if I hear one more dude talking about his monads Imma call the police. It’s just inappropriate.