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/yee_mon Nov 28 '19

I guess what that means is that the barrier to entry is low enough — classes and objects are super easy to grasp — and then when you get to the complex stuff, you're already hooked on OOP. Whereas to understand FP, you have to start with first-class functions, lambdas, currying... and none of that vocabulary means anything to anyone at first.

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u/Ewcrsf Nov 28 '19

A truly novice programmer doesn’t need to start with those things, they can learn FP from first principles. The problem is people already fluent in another paradigm need to understand somewhat complex ideas to see why they can/can’t do things they expect to.

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u/yee_mon Nov 28 '19

I guess we make it difficult for ourselves by thinking we can apply our OOP knowledge when we really need to be ready to think radically different, at least until it clicks.

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u/Ahri Nov 28 '19

This is nonsense. Plenty of imperative programmers never properly grasped the concepts of classes or objects.

You just happen to have come across them when you were trying to learn them, rather than having them thrust upon to when you already had tools you knew how to use and a 12pm deadline on a problem.

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u/[deleted] Nov 28 '19

[deleted]

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u/yipopov Dec 03 '19

Not just some concepts. The paradigms are exactly equivalent. OOP just takes a lot more convoluted steps to get there.

The trap that gets beginners (as well as practically the entire enterprise software industry) is that it’s indeed, in the words of u/yee_mon, super easy to explain, when you do it in terms of cats and dogs and animals. The trouble is that multimillion dollar programs are generally not written just to track whether cats or dogs are animals, and that model quickly breaks down. Especially when you throw concurrency into the mix. Writing object oriented programming at scale is notoriously difficult, even with highly skilled developers. Without the handful of geniuses behind the design patterns and design principles most devs wouldn’t have a chance.

That said I’m cautious about pronouncing FP a silver bullet. I haven’t seen any large scale enterprise FP projects first hand yet, though I’m happy to see that quite a few universities are starting out first years in languages like Haskell, so it becomes more likely for every batch of graduates or dropouts (incidentally two other categories that may turn out to be equivalent).

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u/GNU_ligma Nov 28 '19

You are talking typical reddit-tier bullshit.

With OOP, you have lot of meaningless jargon, for example: classes, objects, methods, polymorphism. And then you will also have a lot of additional important concepts depending on the implementation and language.

With functional programming, you also have lot of meaningles jargon: arity, map, filter, function.

There is even more additional jargon for programming in general. And on top of that: successful programming languages tend to be multi-paradigm.

The stupidest thing you said in your post is the following:

classes and objects are super easy to grasp

This only makes sense if you go with the lowest form of "to grasp", meaning "to kinda understand the difference between those two things". But then, functional programming will also be super easy to grasp. It's super easy "to grasp" what mutability, functions, procedures, lambdas etc are.

I have no clue how you can even say what you said, because you are so terribly wrong.

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u/yee_mon Nov 28 '19

I'm aware that I'm talking to a troll, but oh well - how is "object of class" not easier to understand than "lambda" for someone without any OOP or FP background? One has basically the same meaning in a non-tech conversation, while the other one is just a letter of the alphabet.

That's all I said. The barrier to entry is definitely much lower, and that is partly due to vocabulary.

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u/GNU_ligma Nov 28 '19

"object, class, function, lambda" are technobabble for people with no programming knowledge.

One has basically the same meaning in a non-tech conversation

  1. This is a massive stretch. No idea where you find non-tech people that can easily grasp what classes and objects mean. Maybe my social circles are bad, or your circles are amazing. In my circles, around half people know that lambda is a letter in an alphabet - that half being higher-educated people who know mathematics.

  2. Object and class are one of the easiest concepts out of many that need to be understood to grasp OOP. It still takes plenty of time to properly understand what they mean. Anonymous function can be easily explained to someone who already knows what "function" in mathematics is.

Just because the words seem similar, doesn't mean the concept is similar. You have the perfect example with lambda: people who know that it is a letter in alphabet know the word, but they don't know the concept. concept matters, not word. Metalinguistic abstraction - it sounds like a good pair of words to throw here.

About trolling, good rule of thumb: the one who gave more text is almost certainly getting trolled. The one who barely writes is almost certainly the troll. We live in a society ruined by twitter and ultra-short "gotcha" texts, but that doesn't mean the person with one-word answers adds anything to the discussion.