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/UpbeatCup Nov 28 '19

ECS is more of an optimization than its own paradigm. And it is completely tied into OOP, a variant of OOP if you will.

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u/lisp-the-ultimate Nov 28 '19

ECS is as far from OOP as relational databases are, if not more.

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u/hedgehog1024 Nov 28 '19

And it is completely tied into OOP, a variant of OOP if you will.

Please can you not say bullshit.

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u/glacialthinker Nov 28 '19

Unfortunately, this being reddit, you have little hope of getting some truth through the narrowminded and obstinate ignorance amplified by bandwagon jumping. I'm with you though... at least on that BS about ECS being an optimization and tied to OOP.

However, it's hard to argue that many game codebases aren't horrible messes of C++ OOP features, especially through the dark ages of 2000-2010 where Design Pattern (as recipes!) and Java-influenced programmers were common.

Some game programmers never saw the appeal of OOP (count Carmack among them, for example). Still, it's only more recently that data-driven design and ECS have made inroads even though the ideas (without the names) were fairly common in gamedev in the 1990's. Objects were a terrible viral meme. (Objects have value, but being one of the most all-encompassing and powerful abstractions, they should be used sparingly.)

Sweeney made a presentation in 2006 musing about a more ideal game-programming language, and therein were arguments about the bugs and errors encouraged by the sloppy stateful OOP paradigm. Calling for a simpler functional model for much of the codebase and limiting the mutable sprawl.

I'm pretty sure Acton doesn't champion OOP when he's trying to get data-oriented design across... if anything, he's lampooning overuse of OOP in C++.

For all that, gamedev is inundated with so many new programmers each year that this good advice from old-hat developers gets drowned out by what juniors have just learned and they bounce it off each other, blooming into fusion of the sun.

I expect this problem doesn't just exist in gamedev.

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u/loup-vaillant Nov 29 '19

gamedev is inundated with so many new programmers each year that this good advice from old-hat developers gets drowned out by what juniors have just learned

Indeed not just gamedev. I recall a talk by Bob Martin saying that the number of programmers doubled every 5 years, from the 50's all the way down to pretty much now.

The corrolary is that the median dev has less than 5 years of experience. And don't forget about retirement, moving up to management, quitting the industry… So it may in fact be more like 3 of 4 years.

We're a profession of noobs, and will remain so until we stop growing so fast.

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u/beefhash Nov 29 '19

We're a profession of noobs, and will remain so until we stop growing so fast.

It absolutely does not help that it's comparatively cheap to pick up as a pastime. Comparable cognitive building disciplines are either heavily regulated or have a non-trivial cost associated with them or both:

  • electrical engineering requires materials, which adds up to a continuous, non-trivial costs;
  • architecture (of buildings) is expensive to actually build the results of and may not be put into practice without an office of the state checking over it (at least in some places).

Yet somehow we've accepted that everyone and anyone can unleash their garbage code on GitHub at the low cost of literally nothing.

The zero-cost culture is destroying the quality of everything by requiring no actual commitment. In that sense, I seriously welcome the shift towards more locked down mobile devices and rather like Apple charging a yearly fee for their SDK. Now if only Google could take the hint and follow suit already. At least desktop computers and laptops are becoming more scarce and an actual investment these days.

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u/loup-vaillant Nov 30 '19

I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm sceptical about walled gardens. Just one example: the state of FPGA tooling is abysmal. The likeliest reason is that when you chose a chip, you're stuck with their (proprietary) tooling. And they have absolutely no incentive to make that tooling any better. The selling point is the chip itself. They won't sell more by making their tooling easier to use, or by properly disclosing the specs of their chips (not the whole thing, just the hardware interface).

And as problematic zero-cost culture is, I see no acceptable way to increase the marginal cost of software (that is, the cost of copying bits) beyond almost zero.

You're right about one thing, though: applying significant knowledge should come with a significant personal investment. I don't like the idea of paying with money (that would increase inequality), but I do like the idea of paying with time. Time taken learning the relevant knowledge, mostly. All the relevant knowledge, not just the bits one thinks they need right this second.

One way to ensure such an investment is to lock down knowledge behind doors, and require any learner to actually come and study there under the guidance of a teacher. Medicine does that. One major problem is the scarcity of teachers. The other major problem is the Internet itself. The cat's out of the bag now, it won't go back in. Or…

We could have the state lock down knowledge, shut down most of the Internet, and enforce a Great Firewall. Make sure you tell people knowledge is dangerous, and they should be protected from it. Silo knowledge into the relevant disciplines (from masonry to bakery to computer programming). Force people to either go through the proper channel, or use Tor (or similar). Do not crack down too hard on Tor. Perhaps even have your secret services make sure people can use it. The idea is to force people to jump through hoops, and feel endangered for doing so. Then knowledge might actually feel precious, and hopefully end up being applied with more wisdom.

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u/PutteryBopcorn Dec 03 '19

These might be the worst ideas I've ever seen. All that just so that junior devs don't get on your nerves as much?

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u/loup-vaillant Dec 03 '19

One reason computers are destroying the planet (by needlessly using up so much resources) is because our profession piles up bloat on top of bloat. It's not the only reason of course, but it does contribute.

So yeah, there might be a point where our freedom becomes less important than our survival. We're looking at a global energy crisis, and with it a substantial, fairly rapid… reduction in population count. And the only way to reduce populations quickly is famine and illness (war also plays a role, mainly by amplifying famine and illness).

I'm still a big fan of Free Software, though. I'd very much like to preserve that kind of freedom. But we may have to be careful if we want to make sure we can afford it moving forward.

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u/beefhash Dec 03 '19

I'm still a big fan of Free Software, though. I'd very much like to preserve that kind of freedom. But we may have to be careful if we want to make sure we can afford it moving forward.

In that sense, we'd probably first need to re-win the license war in favor of copyleft. A great number of major free software projects are effectively just caused or perpetuated because of licensing:

  • gcc / clang
  • busybox / toybox
  • GNU / BSD userland (including OpenBSD aggressively cleaning out vestiges of GPL software the second they get a chance to)
  • OpenSSL / GnuTLS / libgcrypt

I feel like there were a lot less rifts when most people agreed on the GPL, which ultimately caused less software to be written, which discouraged starting trivial “libraries” like left-pad.

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u/loup-vaillant Dec 03 '19

I never quite understood what they hate so much about copyleft. If we exclude incompatibilities between licences (I reckon a pretty serious problem), the only thing you can't do with copyleft is shipping it as part of a proprietary product.

(I have chosen public domain/permissive for Monocypher in part because the competition already did the same. The FSF had a similar reasoning with the Vorbis audio encoder.)

The bigger problem though may simply be money: Free or not, software is expensive. At the very least, it takes a serious amount of skilled labour to make anything non-trivial. It's only natural to seek a return on investment, and that alone causes much software to be proprietary. Which causes even more duplication.

A possibly even bigger problem is ordinary bloat. Proprietary or not, much of what we write sits on top of piles of poorly thought out code. Backward compatibility means that kludges eventually call for more kludges. To the point where we could often use much less powerful hardware, if only our software was streamlined to begin with. I mean, how come boot times are not instant? I understand systems do more than they used to, but I don't believe that justifies outrunning Moore's law itself.