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I posted this link after seeing it in this [0] article condemning functional programming languages. While I don't necessarily agree that FPL's should be avoide

I posted this link after seeing it in this [0] article condemning functional programming languages. While I don't necessarily agree that FPL's should be avoided, I was hoping some interesting discussion might emerge from it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10566899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10566899

sethrin 11y ago
That article was a fairly factless rant. To my mind, while there may be good reasons to avoid FPLs, that article doesn't present any. It reads like it was written by an angry non-technical co-founder, and its use of images was more appropriate to Buzzfeed than HN. There are certainly more businesses where an army of mediocre Java or PHP programmers are sufficient to keep a piece of software in a useful state than there are environments where you need FPLs, but blanket condemnation is not really worth the time it takes to read. Also, equating a $60k PHP dev and a $150k Haskell dev is likely to be a serious error. And of course, describing FPLs as Turing Tarpits is indefensible. In other words, there's not much in that article to discuss.
- jaytaylor 11y ago
  Fair enough, thanks for your thoughtful analysis!
acjohnson55 11y ago
I shared that same link a couple days ago, mostly hoping to see if it sparked some interesting convo. No one bit. It's a silly article though given that it's pretty clear that functional programming is actually taking over, bit by bit. Not so much the functional languages themselves, but the techniques -- Python's comprehensions, Ruby's blocks, Javascript's Underscore library, and so on. I guess it's debatable whether real startups should go "full functional" but as traditionally imperative and traditionally functional languages continue to converge, it probably matters less and less.
asgard1024 11y ago
I don't think FPLs by themselves are (Turing) tar pits. On the other hand, there are lambda-calculus tar pits - for example SKI combinators. This shows that even a language that has referential transparency and lazy evaluation can be a tar pit; so these qualities by themselves are not a way to avoid complexity. I hope one day we will be able to mathematically formulate what is "unnecessary complexity".. but so far, no idea.
baobrien 11y ago
I'm pretty sure the person that wrote that is either a troll or mentally ill. All of their posts are poorly written anti-functional programming rants. They're also on reddit with the same sort of thing.
- SamReidHughes 11y ago
  And Twitter. It's an insultingly obvious troll account, and... I think that's half the point.

sethrin 11y ago

That article was a fairly factless rant. To my mind, while there may be good reasons to avoid FPLs, that article doesn't present any. It reads like it was written by an angry non-technical co-founder, and its use of images was more appropriate to Buzzfeed than HN. There are certainly more businesses where an army of mediocre Java or PHP programmers are sufficient to keep a piece of software in a useful state than there are environments where you need FPLs, but blanket condemnation is not really worth the time it takes to read. Also, equating a $60k PHP dev and a $150k Haskell dev is likely to be a serious error. And of course, describing FPLs as Turing Tarpits is indefensible. In other words, there's not much in that article to discuss.

jaytaylor 11y ago
Fair enough, thanks for your thoughtful analysis!

acjohnson55 11y ago

I shared that same link a couple days ago, mostly hoping to see if it sparked some interesting convo. No one bit. It's a silly article though given that it's pretty clear that functional programming is actually taking over, bit by bit. Not so much the functional languages themselves, but the techniques -- Python's comprehensions, Ruby's blocks, Javascript's Underscore library, and so on. I guess it's debatable whether real startups should go "full functional" but as traditionally imperative and traditionally functional languages continue to converge, it probably matters less and less.

asgard1024 11y ago

I don't think FPLs by themselves are (Turing) tar pits. On the other hand, there are lambda-calculus tar pits - for example SKI combinators. This shows that even a language that has referential transparency and lazy evaluation can be a tar pit; so these qualities by themselves are not a way to avoid complexity. I hope one day we will be able to mathematically formulate what is "unnecessary complexity".. but so far, no idea.

baobrien 11y ago

I'm pretty sure the person that wrote that is either a troll or mentally ill. All of their posts are poorly written anti-functional programming rants. They're also on reddit with the same sort of thing.

SamReidHughes 11y ago
And Twitter. It's an insultingly obvious troll account, and... I think that's half the point.