4 ms·

Yeah, but if you're a functional human being, you don't _need_ patterns.

• poat 10y ago
  That's like saying you don't need math. For the most part, in everyday life, that's true, but there are cases where functional human beings disagree, or we find ourselves in novel situations that we don't know how to handle. In those cases, we need new ways to think and communicate. Intuition works great for catching a ball, but you'll need math to land a rocket on mars.
  • thom 10y ago
    This was my attempt to joke about the fact that every time design patterns in software architecture are mentioned, someone pipes up about how design patterns aren't useful in functional languages because it's all built in.
  • Retra 10y ago
    You don't need math 'the language', but only because your ad-hoc inferences are suitable. You do need math 'the models' because you can't think without those things. The subject of math isn't actually esoteric. It's the community and conventions that are esoteric.
• fatdog 10y ago
  Patterns are descriptors for how things relate, and arguably what makes someone smart or stupid is their ability to parse the dynamics of relationships among things. There are a bunch of concepts from multiple disciplines that get used in companies every day. Some of them are stupid euphemisms used by managers who don't understand things, but a lot of them are about getting everyone to understand the importance of how one thing affects another. Here are some: - elasticity (of demand) - sunk cost - diminishing returns - scale - long poles - optionality - convexivity - long tail - fat tail - short position - indexing (over) - leverage - advantage - decisive power