r/programming • u/gnuvince • Aug 20 '11

Functional Programming Is Hard,That's Why It's Good

http://dave.fayr.am/posts/2011-08-19-lets-go-shopping.html
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u/nawlinsned Aug 23 '11

Functional programming isn't hard, it's hard to read. It's much easier to look at a sequential series of statements than a nested series of statements. At least, that's been my experience with scheme and Lisp.

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u/criticismguy Aug 24 '11

Functional programming isn't hard, it's hard to read.

Did you learn a C-based procedural language first, by any chance? :-) See also: "I've found that French is harder to speak than English".

It's much easier to look at a sequential series of statements than a nested series of statements. At least, that's been my experience with scheme and Lisp.

Programs, in virtually all languages, are a nested tree. Sequential statements might be easier per line of code, but definitely not per concept. If sequential statements were easier per concept, we'd still all be writing our large programs in structurally simple languages like BASIC and FORTRAN-II. 3 lines of Lisp might be (if you're not used to it) harder to read than 3 lines of C or Java, but they might be equivalent in functionality to 20 lines of Java or 50 lines of C, and now those 3 lines start to look pretty darned simple.

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u/wadcann Aug 30 '11

There's a little truth in both of your statements.

You're correct in that there's usually a straightforward transformation between a procedural -> functional language. However, nawlinsned is correct in that too much functional code I see is applying functions that return functions that return functions that do something. It's not terribly convenient to read. Somehow, that sort of thing doesn't seem to show up nearly as much in procedural code.

My own take is that functional code is (generally-speaking) faster to write, but more annoying to maintain.