4 ms·

1. "Shallow" OOP - minimal use of inheritance, composition ok but without making a Russian doll with 7+ layers with it. 2. "Grand scale Functional characterist

by nnq 9y ago

1. "Shallow" OOP - minimal use of inheritance, composition ok but without making a Russian doll with 7+ layers with it. 2. "Grand scale Functional characteristics" - exposed API should try and have "referential transparency" and "composability" (you can write systems with "functional properties" in languages like PHP just fine btw.)... find not much benefit from "small scale / low level" FP. 3. Wrap stateful algorithms & other code rich in mutable variables in either (a) referentiaally transparent functions or (b) shallow objects that make it obvious how and when state changes. 4. Avoid the "islands of functional purity in a sea of objects" pattern like the plague - it results in large scale intellectual masturbation at the small scale, and incomprehensible systems at a large scale, your monadic fantasy is useless when stuck inside the method of a 8-levels-inherited monster object... functional is important on a whole-system level, a 10 line method is easy to understand even if it mutates local variables all over the place In theory FP would be great at all scales when coupled with a good type system... but I've never got to work on projects in languages like Haskell or Scala and I'm not sure I could handle the cognitive overhead of it. Oh, and don't use Exceptions, ever!

nnq 9y ago
On programming languages: It also doesn't matter whether the language has such a good support for functional programming when you don't care about doing in on the small, inside inner-inner-function level, so `map`, `foldr`, functor or whatever... make no much difference. As long as you have the basics, like "first class functions" and "lexical closures", you can do "large-scale functional" programming in languages like Go just fine. It actually feels more refreshing in a minimalist language like this and with a minimalist and explicit type system :)

by nnq 9y ago

nnq 9y ago

On programming languages: It also doesn't matter whether the language has such a good support for functional programming when you don't care about doing in on the small, inside inner-inner-function level, so `map`, `foldr`, functor or whatever... make no much difference. As long as you have the basics, like "first class functions" and "lexical closures", you can do "large-scale functional" programming in languages like Go just fine. It actually feels more refreshing in a minimalist language like this and with a minimalist and explicit type system :)