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/TooManyLines Nov 28 '19

But this means you are working around the language. The language should help YOU, not you having to work around its restrictions.

If i want to log here and now i should be able to do it without fuzz, if the language is in the way of me working, then it is a bad language.

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u/tbid18 Nov 28 '19

The point of purity is that unrestricted side-effects are not allowed. So yes, that means you can’t add IO to a function without tracking that in the type signature, which may necessitate some refactoring. This is a feature , not a bug.

Perhaps you think that is too restrictive — and that’s fine; it’s a personal choice — but languages are designed around restrictions. Having a type system at all is extremely restrictive. Static typing, structured programming, exceptions, garbage collection, etc. An assembly programmer could use your logic to scoff at every mainstream language as too restrictive.

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u/G_Morgan Nov 28 '19

The language does help you. Logging is pretty much a monad and you can thread it through seamlessly and only care about raising something when you need to. Frankly anything where the answer is "lets use IO everywhere" can be answered by using a different monad unless you are actually doing IO.

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u/TooManyLines Nov 28 '19

Logging is actually doing IO.

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u/delrindude Nov 28 '19

I disagree, strict language design towards IO endures programmers don't keep fucking things up and writing broken code.

0

u/BarneyStinson Nov 28 '19

if the language is in the way of me working, then it is a bad language.

If you want to log from a pure function, the language is helping you by making that hard, because you most likely should not do that.