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The other side of the extreme is functional languages which have yet to have the big breakthrough in business.
by erk__ 7y ago
The other side of the extreme is functional languages which have yet to have the big breakthrough in business.
- agumonkey 7y agoImmutability and recursion patterns do shrink the search space to a minuscule spot. It may fit ones brain. But some people have a state driven thinking process, which I despised for decades but recently got to understand. I see why people like to code in C-land. The issue is that, since it's not a straightjacket like ~pure FP, if you don't have a brain that sees state, state variable, lifetimes, etc etc, you're free to write piles of crap. Especially when young because you may believe that complex => more code, and complex is good. ps: note that I'm not criticizing FP or static/math oriented programming. I'm just trying to pu both sides into a shared perspective
- pishpash 7y agoThe real world has state. Mathematics don't. There are different domains in which different languages are most expressive.
- bayesian_horse 7y agoI would not want to teach novice programmers a purely functional language... And that's what it comes down to, almost always. How hard is it to hire other people to work on your code, and how hard is it to bring people up to speed, who need to code, but aren't programmers. Scientists, mostly. Business people increasingly.
- wtetzner 7y agoI don't think you have to go for purely functional. Jane Street, for example, went with OCaml in part because the business people found the code easier to review than other languages.
- bayesian_horse 7y agoI've heard good things about OCaml, but it's extremely niche.
- wtetzner 7y agoSure, but that was just an example to illustrate my point. Some of these languages are viewed as hard to learn simply because they are unfamiliar. But to someone who's never programmed before, all languages are unfamiliar, and it turned out, at least in Jane Street's case, that OCaml was easier for the business people to understand than Java or C#, or even Excel macros.
- icxa 7y agoI am in no way a OCaml fan, and I primarily use Go at work. That said, the fact that OCaml is used by Bloomberg and Facebook (on multiple apps and products) alone make it not niche http://www.ocaml.org/learn/companies.html http://www.ocaml.org/learn/companies.html That plus ReasonML's growing popularity, which is essentially just a syntax extension of OCaml, makes it even further not niche.
- bayesian_horse 7y agoOh I don't doubt, that SOMEONE is using these nice languages. Still, the community of OCaml or Haskell is not nearly as big and diverse as the Python community. And that counts in all sorts of ways. You'll have much more trouble finding answers to any questions you have. You'll have less chances for community meetings or educational content. You'll definitely have more trouble finding new developers for your projects, both in business and in open source.