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Piling a bunch of redundant libraries on top of each other, becoming confused, and drawing the conclusion that functional programming was the problem? Okay.

bjpbakker 9y ago
Yeah this was basically also my conclusion of the article. If you really want to do clojure(/script) no language but clojure will give you that experience. It doesn't make functional programming in javascript an anti-pattern just because it does not become clojure. That's much like saying that you can't do functional programming in clojure because there are no monads and proper static type checking.
chriswarbo 9y ago
Yeah, I was quite confused when reading. Semantically, Javascript is basically a crappy Scheme (first class functions, lexical closure, etc. but no macros, tail calls, call-cc, etc.), with lightweight objects and prototypical inheritance. The functional/OO split in JS is basically whether to focus on the Scheme part and only use objects as hash tables, or whether to focus on the objects, methods and inheritance and avoid Schemey functions. You don't need any libraries to do either. If it makes life easier to include a library (whether functional or OO or whatever) then include it; if it doesn't, then don't.
- globuous 9y ago
  I thought tail calls were in the ES6 spec, just not implemented by all browsers or something. Node has a flag to use tail call optimization I believe. EDIT: ES2015 specs [1]: "Some of its major enhancements include modules, class declarations, lexical block scoping, iterators and generators, promises for asynchronous programming, destructuring patterns, and proper tail calls." (emphasis mine) [1] http://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/6.0/ http://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/6.0/ (introduction)
athenot 9y ago
JS may not be the most elegant language in the world, but it's still possible to apply some functional patterns to it without having to use a "functional" runtime/transpiler. My draw to FP is to limit side-effects as much as possible. Personally I like to follow a message-oriented setup (stealing a play from Erlang's book) instead of shared variables. A useful lib I found on the client-side is postal.js but there are many other ways to do it.

bjpbakker 9y ago

Yeah this was basically also my conclusion of the article. If you really want to do clojure(/script) no language but clojure will give you that experience. It doesn't make functional programming in javascript an anti-pattern just because it does not become clojure. That's much like saying that you can't do functional programming in clojure because there are no monads and proper static type checking.

chriswarbo 9y ago

Yeah, I was quite confused when reading. Semantically, Javascript is basically a crappy Scheme (first class functions, lexical closure, etc. but no macros, tail calls, call-cc, etc.), with lightweight objects and prototypical inheritance. The functional/OO split in JS is basically whether to focus on the Scheme part and only use objects as hash tables, or whether to focus on the objects, methods and inheritance and avoid Schemey functions. You don't need any libraries to do either. If it makes life easier to include a library (whether functional or OO or whatever) then include it; if it doesn't, then don't.

globuous 9y ago
I thought tail calls were in the ES6 spec, just not implemented by all browsers or something. Node has a flag to use tail call optimization I believe. EDIT: ES2015 specs [1]: "Some of its major enhancements include modules, class declarations, lexical block scoping, iterators and generators, promises for asynchronous programming, destructuring patterns, and proper tail calls." (emphasis mine) [1] http://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/6.0/ http://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/6.0/ (introduction)

athenot 9y ago

JS may not be the most elegant language in the world, but it's still possible to apply some functional patterns to it without having to use a "functional" runtime/transpiler. My draw to FP is to limit side-effects as much as possible. Personally I like to follow a message-oriented setup (stealing a play from Erlang's book) instead of shared variables. A useful lib I found on the client-side is postal.js but there are many other ways to do it.