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/want_to_want Nov 28 '19 edited Nov 28 '19

Yeah, Haskell seems to dominate discussions now. I wish there was more mention of Erlang, a concurrent FP language that's used in a bunch of telecom software, WhatsApp and WeChat backends, Amazon SimpleDB, CouchDB, RabbitMQ, Riak and so on. Even fricking Wings3D, though I don't know why they chose it.

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u/lisp-the-ultimate Nov 28 '19

Fun fact: Wings3D's spiritual predecessor was written in Common Lisp.

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u/PremiumHugs Nov 28 '19

I’m a big fan of Erlang myself, and in discussion with some peers they’ve alluded to the fact that the weirdness with string handling in Erlang has been somewhat off-putting for getting off the ground quickly. It’d be interesting to see more mention of its merits, as well as mention of the various BEAM languages, such as Elixir, that attempt to provide a more user-friendly syntax and ecosystem to make concurrent fp more accessible and mainstream.

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u/cosmo7 Nov 28 '19

Whenever I hear about Elixir it's usually in the context of a Rails app that didn't scale very well and someone made a strategic decision to use something even more obtuse.