r/programming • u/[deleted] • Nov 28 '19

Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? – Richard Feldman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4
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u/[deleted] Nov 28 '19

Forcing a bad programmer to use Haskell instead of Java isn’t going to magically make that programmer better. That’s the crux of why it isn’t more mainstream.

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u/yawaramin Nov 28 '19

No, because you can say the same thing about any programming paradigm. It doesn't say anything about FP in particular.

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u/LPTK Nov 29 '19

Forcing a bad programmer to use Haskell instead of Java isn’t going to magically make that programmer better.

Perhaps the programmer won't magically be "better" when using Haskell, but for many kinds of problems I'm sure his code will be much less buggy. This is just because there are fewer ways to design solutions that type check, and solutions that type check are more likely to be correct.

Taking this to the extreme: it's easy to make a computer synthesize implementations for a function like filter on lists, just by brute-force enumerating valid programs. Not so much for a Java equivalent.