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> Multi-paradigm has always beaten pure ideologies hands down when it comes to delivering useful programs that actually work without making programmers do menta

> Multi-paradigm has always beaten pure ideologies hands down when it comes to delivering useful programs that actually work without making programmers do mental gymnastics for the sake of purity. Don't think anyone is arguing with that (even the author of this piece). But the functional patterns that contribute to useful programs today are the direct result of the kind of pure theoretical thinking here. To me, your argument could be used against any theoretical research in any field. None of it is of practical use until it is.

dahart 8y ago
> Don't think anyone is arguing with that (even the author of this piece) The author is openly and explicitly arguing for a single paradigm, and he clearly stated in the article that he is in favor of, and calling for people to do the mental gymnastics for the sake of purity. > the functional patterns that contribute to useful programs today are the direct result of the kind of pure theoretical thinking here. FP isn’t pure theoretic, so I’m not sure what you mean. The foundations haven’t changed considerably in decades, and it has been possible and practical to write high-level FP code to, say, compute factorials or whatever, for decades. FP is great as a high-level design tool to simplify and reduce mutable state. But there’s no evidence that taking it to the limit with human interaction and hardware is even possible or what it means or why it’s useful. > your argument could be used against any theoretical research in any field. None of it is of practical use until it is. But you neglect to mention that much theoretical research never becomes practical, and some is proven impossible. Practicality is and always will be a useful and valid argument, even if it’s occasionally wrong.
- platz 8y ago
  > for the sake of purity. The post was about choosing a representation for sake of composition. In this case, the composition happens to be pure because it is mathmatical, but the simplest composition was the actual goal, not just any kind of purity.
  - dahart 8y ago
    The post discusses weak vs strong composition, not simple vs complex. The goal is FP for I/O so that composing is pure, so that it’s strong, whatever that means. We already have simple composition of programs with Von Neumann I/O, so I’m not sure I can agree with you. To that end, I found his example of number composition quite unconvincing. He said we use binary and not strings for composability. That’s not true. Numbers represented as strings are no less composable. The only real downside is they’re less memory and time efficient, but string based numbers are just as composable as binary numbers.

dahart 8y ago

> Don't think anyone is arguing with that (even the author of this piece) The author is openly and explicitly arguing for a single paradigm, and he clearly stated in the article that he is in favor of, and calling for people to do the mental gymnastics for the sake of purity. > the functional patterns that contribute to useful programs today are the direct result of the kind of pure theoretical thinking here. FP isn’t pure theoretic, so I’m not sure what you mean. The foundations haven’t changed considerably in decades, and it has been possible and practical to write high-level FP code to, say, compute factorials or whatever, for decades. FP is great as a high-level design tool to simplify and reduce mutable state. But there’s no evidence that taking it to the limit with human interaction and hardware is even possible or what it means or why it’s useful. > your argument could be used against any theoretical research in any field. None of it is of practical use until it is. But you neglect to mention that much theoretical research never becomes practical, and some is proven impossible. Practicality is and always will be a useful and valid argument, even if it’s occasionally wrong.

platz 8y ago
> for the sake of purity. The post was about choosing a representation for sake of composition. In this case, the composition happens to be pure because it is mathmatical, but the simplest composition was the actual goal, not just any kind of purity.
- dahart 8y ago
  The post discusses weak vs strong composition, not simple vs complex. The goal is FP for I/O so that composing is pure, so that it’s strong, whatever that means. We already have simple composition of programs with Von Neumann I/O, so I’m not sure I can agree with you. To that end, I found his example of number composition quite unconvincing. He said we use binary and not strings for composability. That’s not true. Numbers represented as strings are no less composable. The only real downside is they’re less memory and time efficient, but string based numbers are just as composable as binary numbers.