Re: Functional programming

No, please, no. Do not use functional programming. It is not commercially
viable. Logically it is a precursor to object-oriented programming. The
only practical differences between functional programming and
object-oriented programming is that with object-oriented programming you
can compartmentalize the external state into objects and with functional
programming, from a theoretical pure perspective, the exact same thing just
gets crammed into "global input" environment variables included in the
parameter list. Also, functional programming enthusiasts tend to think that
the more executable code looks like a gigantic regex, the more
sophisticated it is. The only thing I like about functional programming in
the real world to date is the simpler list comprehensions in Python. Other
than that, functional programming is a step backward. In particular, Scala
is an abomination.

On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 5:35 PM, Sergio Tortosa Benedito <[email protected]
> wrote:

> Coming from a PhD student makes me interested in fp and in frp, btw have
> you tried frp? Can you say anything about it?
>
> -- Best regards, Sergio
> El 17/9/2015 21:41, "Hisham" <[email protected]> escribió:
>
>> On 6 September 2015 at 18:47, Liam Proven <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > On 6 September 2015 at 19:16, Sergio Tortosa Benedito
>> > <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >> Anyone has tried it?
>>
>> Yes, currently I'm a PhD student in a Programming Languages research
>> lab, and I've done a bit of functional programming, so here's my two
>> cents:
>>
>> >> I've been looking at it for some days (thought I
>> >> already knew it), and has anyone tried it? Specially since my main
>> point of
>> >> interest are "stateful" apps (such as GUI and games),
>>
>> This is hard in the beginning, but there is one a-ha moment when you
>> realize that the difficulty there is because we're not used to
>> "taming" state, and we just scatter it all over in our imperative
>> programs. After doing functional programming, having implicit state
>> everywhere feels a bit like programming with global variables: you're
>> not compartmentalizing the impact of an important aspect of your
>> program. The feeling that "the contents of this function don't affect
>> the code anywhere else than its return value" is pretty good.
>>
>> Imperative programming still beats functional programming in terms of
>> writing high-performance/low-memory code easily, though, but we often
>> overestimate which parts of our programs need to be optimized, anyway.
>> I also find debugging FP code harder, but then I have a lot more
>> experience with imperative.
>>
>> >> it's worth the change
>> >> in style of thinking?
>>
>> Yes. Getting some experience with it affects even the way you write
>> code in imperative languages. You become more atuned to the
>> relationships of data, and manipulating functions as first-class
>> objects becomes second-nature, and not an "advanced feature", often
>> leading to very elegant code.
>>
>> >>  And it ends up being easy to kniw what it's written?
>>
>> Like any other language, that depends more on the writer than the
>> language. When I write Haskell, I tend to split my code in a gazillion
>> short functions, so that makes me come up with lots of names, for each
>> bit of the code. With good names, the code becomes easy to follow.
>>
>> But it's as easy to write hard-to-read Haskell as any other language
>> (it has an extensive standard library and code that uses it a lot can
>> be hard to follow if you don't know what all those functions do).
>>
>> > Haskell is more of an academic plaything:
>>
>> It might still be _more_ of an academic plaything than an industry
>> language, but this has been changing in recent years. Major companies
>> such as Facebook have been using Haskell in the development of some
>> parts of their infrastructure.
>>
>> -- Hisham
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