4 ms·
Well, is not all the new trendiness in functional programming some evidence of the answer to this?
by hellofunk 10y ago
Well, is not all the new trendiness in functional programming some evidence of the answer to this?
- meira 10y agoNew to who?
- mordocai 10y agoThe industry as a whole
- adgasf 10y agoI used to work in financial services, and functional programming was a very new and alien concept there, even in 2016.
- willtim 10y agoNot in all banks. Standard Chartered and Barclays have probably the largest Haskell codebases in existence. Many others are investing in Scala (e.g. Morgan Stanley). It's probably more of an alien concept to the likes of Google and Amazon.
- jghn 10y agoGoogle has a fair amount of clojure, or at least they did at one point of time, although it was inherited from an acquisition.
- willtim 10y agoAh yes Clojure, Citigroup had a team of 70+ fulltime Clojure developers in Credit last I heard. The examples I'm giving are all strategic commitments to FP by senior management. The Google situation sounds more likely to be viewed as a "problem" by them as (last I heard), Clojure was not on their white list.
- maxxxxx 10y agoPretty much everybody in the industry? Even new college grads don't seem to know much about FP.
- bordercases 10y agoGood. More for me.
- maxxxxx 10y agoI don't think that's good. Knowing FP is not really a competitive advantage if nobody uses it.
- bordercases 10y agoBut can something that everybody uses become a competitive advantage? Intuitively that doesn't seem true to me, although it would be an interesting dynamic if it was. So it seems like you need a small collection of successful early adopters to prove its value instead as a middle ground for there to be any concentration of advantage at all. I assume you're putting "competitive advantage" in reference to "gets me hired" instead of strictly "gets the job done well", in which case, yeah, someone hiring someone else for the way they get a job done rather than their ability to do so would probably get you stuck. You could fake your way in. Otherwise you might be referring to "no one will get my code", which is also a legitimate concern.
- maxxxxx 10y agoI think you are probably better off being a top performer in a very common field. There is more opportunity that way. If you are lucky you can also be an early adopter in a growing field and ride the wave. For example, Erlang and Haskell are cool languages and probably a technically better choice but I am not sure being an Erlang developer is a good choice for career development. There are not too many options for working in that field.
- 10y ago
- hellofunk 10y agoIt's the trendiness that is new, not FP itself. And, it appears to be new to a majority of the working developers in the world.
- abecedarius 10y agoAs someone who studied SICP in the 80s and continued on to ML, etc., I can say that even though functional programming is far from dominant now, it's way trendier than back then, so much so that there's just no question.
- meira 10y agoThere is at least 3 to 4 years of fp hype. I don't think the hype is still hype. Who think ls it is something new is a laggard in the hype sense.