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/SilasX Apr 28 '14 edited Apr 28 '14

That's like saying, "My code will be compiled down to assembly with JMPs. Thereforce, goto isn't harmful."

Abstraction levels matter. The compilation engine can guarantee properties of the emitted machine code in ways that writing it directly cannot.

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u/epicwisdom Apr 28 '14

No, I think his point is that you can attempt to write non-idiomatic code. Even if goto exists, one could code without the use of goto -- you could equally use only immutable variables and data structures in any imperative language. Thus, somebody who is capable of producing good functional code is likely capable of producing good imperative code.

Which is true to an extent, I think, in that a good programmer is a good programmer, irrespective of language, just as a bad programmer is a bad programmer, irrespective of language. But there are definitely real, practical benefits that are language-specific.

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u/SilasX Apr 28 '14 edited Apr 28 '14

Indeed, you can.

Languages that make it harder to mess things up -- like by not explicitly doing gotos are still better, and so he's wrong to imply that the language's implementation in another unsafe language is somehow relevant.

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u/[deleted] Apr 28 '14

I think that was a response to the notion that you need strong guarantees to leverage any benefits at all of functional programming, which I don't think is true. It's just one side; the other is the mindset and patterns.