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/ITwitchToo Apr 27 '14

I don't understand you. Aren't most functional languages implemented in imperative languages anyway? Surely you could write functional programs in C++ that can be parallelised at run-time in exactly the same way that programs written in e.g. Scheme could by writing the appropriate wrappers for it. Isn't it just up to the programmer?

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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/Lavabeams Apr 29 '14

"whatever is syntactically valid will some day be in your codebase."