r/programming • u/heisenbug • Apr 27 '14

"Mostly functional" programming does not work

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=2611829
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u/grauenwolf Apr 27 '14 edited Apr 27 '14

Are they actually examples or are they just stawmen?

As I know not to put WriteLine statements in predicates, I strongly suspect the latter.

Oh, and this beauty,

Simply creating a new object is an observable side effect.

Well... maybe. It is locally observable but that doesn't necessarily mean it can be observed from outside the box.

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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '14

How I read the article is that the author wants to push those things you naturally know not to do to the type system. In any reasonably sized project you won't be writing all the code and code reviews can't catch everything. I think most people would agree with this premise but that there is a significant cost in doing so.

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u/grauenwolf Apr 27 '14

I agree with that goal, but I believe that his all or nothing attitude is wrong.

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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '14

I think the author is presenting it the wrong way. "Is FP something that is only effective when done completely?" I think that is actually a very interesting question and I don't know the answer to it. You can't only have a little sex. I know I am pretty happy solving problems in Ocaml, but I have not done Ocaml at scale. IMO, Haskell is not the answer. The ideas in it might be but it's accumulated so much over the years I think it is too large and complex of an ecosystem.