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It's extremely frustrating that whenever anyone talks about even the slightest positive mention of FP, this site tends to immediately have 2-3 folks pop out of

It's extremely frustrating that whenever anyone talks about even the slightest positive mention of FP, this site tends to immediately have 2-3 folks pop out of nowhere demanding that everyone recognize OO exists. Yes. Yes. We know. You can write programs with OO. It's the dominant paradigm of the software industry. No one here saidthat OO is somehow ineffective, cannot abstract, or lacks cleverness. Please for even comment section just put down the sword and let other folks with equally interesting approaches talk about their work.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
I feel like the HN bias tends to go the other way, that FP is some kind of awesome magic sauce and OOP is the bane of good software. In reality, most of the techniques we discuss don’t really depend on a specific language orientation.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  You can probably prove this one way or another.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    A good number of the posters here are fans of Paul Graham who is a loud FP advocate. Also I've been here for a number of years and I can never recall seeing anyone bashing FP. (Which is totally fine with me.) Bashing Java and and general OO however is to be expected in any programming related thread here (a little tiring but understandable, I too have seen my share of bad OO code.) Neither of this counts as proof but yes, this site comes off as extremely pro FP for me as well.
    - KirinDave 8y ago
      Paul Graham is not a fan of FP, he's a Lisp advocate. Every Lisper will be quick to tell you their approach is a superset of FP with its own unique meta-syntactic tools. This is a great illustration of my point. If you place every differing viewpoint in one bucket and then take the sum, yeah it's gonna see overwhelming. In actuality, there are lots of factions with interesting viewpoints.
    - jstimpfle 8y ago
      > I can never recall seeing anyone bashing FP Well I'm guilty of that, even on this page ;-)
reitanqild 8y ago
What's the problem? Nobody said anything bad about FP at all.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  I'm not sure that's the case here.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    How so? mpweiher's post that you replied to only mentions Smalltalk, Snobol, Prolog, and Icon, neither of which are FP languages AFAIK. Furthermore IIRC the post only defends OO languages. I cannot read it in any way as an attack on FP languages and I've tried multiple times now.
    - KirinDave 8y ago
      "Defends" it from what, exactly?
samatman 8y ago
There is no sense in which OO of the add-backtracking-to-smalltalk variety is the dominant paradigm. That's like saying functional programming is the dominant paradigm, because Javascript has functions. Pointing to prior art is a good and useful thing for a comment to do.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  Literally every OO programmer is on the hook for knowing a huge array of smalltalk-derived patterns. MANY programmers use languages with significant inheritance from Smalltalk. Common Lisp also isn't coming back despite having some amazing features. Let's both dry our tears and move on.
  - HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
    This is a weird argument. Mentioning something great that smalltalk is capable of isn't the same as saying everyone should use smalltalk. It's more saying - let's not forget some of the great stuff that existed in the past that the current crop of popular languages don't have.
    - KirinDave 8y ago
      But no one's going to forget. Every time I mention FP, I have to be on guard for some OO stan showing up demanding that I acknowledge and "not forget" that OO has in fact "done things". Even this example where someone says something totally unrealted to OO, someone felt compelled to leap in and say something as unrelated as, "OO too! Here's a barely related OO project I found to be clever! Please don't forget about us." Let me just remind you how this went: Person A: > The essence of FP is that if you apply a bit of cleverness and engineering, you can replace things that look like they would need custom language features Person B: > Same for OOP, example from 1988: No one even implied that this was exclusive! But certainly other folks have used the word "defense" for that post, perhaps not even realizing it. As if the existence of other paradigms somehow threatens the importance of OO.
      - 8y ago

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

I feel like the HN bias tends to go the other way, that FP is some kind of awesome magic sauce and OOP is the bane of good software. In reality, most of the techniques we discuss don’t really depend on a specific language orientation.

KirinDave 8y ago
You can probably prove this one way or another.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  A good number of the posters here are fans of Paul Graham who is a loud FP advocate. Also I've been here for a number of years and I can never recall seeing anyone bashing FP. (Which is totally fine with me.) Bashing Java and and general OO however is to be expected in any programming related thread here (a little tiring but understandable, I too have seen my share of bad OO code.) Neither of this counts as proof but yes, this site comes off as extremely pro FP for me as well.
  - KirinDave 8y ago
    Paul Graham is not a fan of FP, he's a Lisp advocate. Every Lisper will be quick to tell you their approach is a superset of FP with its own unique meta-syntactic tools. This is a great illustration of my point. If you place every differing viewpoint in one bucket and then take the sum, yeah it's gonna see overwhelming. In actuality, there are lots of factions with interesting viewpoints.
  - jstimpfle 8y ago
    > I can never recall seeing anyone bashing FP Well I'm guilty of that, even on this page ;-)

reitanqild 8y ago

What's the problem? Nobody said anything bad about FP at all.

KirinDave 8y ago
I'm not sure that's the case here.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  How so? mpweiher's post that you replied to only mentions Smalltalk, Snobol, Prolog, and Icon, neither of which are FP languages AFAIK. Furthermore IIRC the post only defends OO languages. I cannot read it in any way as an attack on FP languages and I've tried multiple times now.
  - KirinDave 8y ago
    "Defends" it from what, exactly?

samatman 8y ago

There is no sense in which OO of the add-backtracking-to-smalltalk variety is the dominant paradigm. That's like saying functional programming is the dominant paradigm, because Javascript has functions. Pointing to prior art is a good and useful thing for a comment to do.

KirinDave 8y ago
Literally every OO programmer is on the hook for knowing a huge array of smalltalk-derived patterns. MANY programmers use languages with significant inheritance from Smalltalk. Common Lisp also isn't coming back despite having some amazing features. Let's both dry our tears and move on.
- HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
  This is a weird argument. Mentioning something great that smalltalk is capable of isn't the same as saying everyone should use smalltalk. It's more saying - let's not forget some of the great stuff that existed in the past that the current crop of popular languages don't have.
  - KirinDave 8y ago
    But no one's going to forget. Every time I mention FP, I have to be on guard for some OO stan showing up demanding that I acknowledge and "not forget" that OO has in fact "done things". Even this example where someone says something totally unrealted to OO, someone felt compelled to leap in and say something as unrelated as, "OO too! Here's a barely related OO project I found to be clever! Please don't forget about us." Let me just remind you how this went: Person A: > The essence of FP is that if you apply a bit of cleverness and engineering, you can replace things that look like they would need custom language features Person B: > Same for OOP, example from 1988: No one even implied that this was exclusive! But certainly other folks have used the word "defense" for that post, perhaps not even realizing it. As if the existence of other paradigms somehow threatens the importance of OO.
    - 8y ago