5 ms·

EDIT: I wrote this comment before watching the video. I stand by this comment, but the video is very good and I wholeheartedly agree with its conclusions. As s

by mbo 7y ago

EDIT: I wrote this comment before watching the video. I stand by this comment, but the video is very good and I wholeheartedly agree with its conclusions. As someone who writes pure FP for a living at a rather large and well known org, these threads physically hurt me. They're consistently full of bad takes from people who don't like FP, or haven't written a lick of it. Subsequently, you get judgements that are chock full of misconceptions of what FP actually is, and the pros and cons outsiders believe about FP are completely different from its practitioners. It's always some whinge about FP not mapping "to the metal", which is comical given say, Rust's derivation from what is quite functional stock. My personal belief? We just don't teach it. Unis these days start with Python, so a lot of student's first exposure to programming is a multi-paradigm language that can't really support the higher forms of FP techniques. Sure, there may be a course that covers Haskell or a Lisp, but the majority of the teaching is conducted in C, C++, Java or Python. Grads come out with a 4 year headstart on a non-FP paradigm, why would orgs use languages and techniques that they're going to have to train new grads with from scratch? And training people in FP is bloody time consuming. I've recorded up to 5 hours of lecture content for devs internally teaching functional Scala, which took quadruple the time to write and revise, plus the many hours in 1-on-1 contact teaching Scala and Haskell. Not a lot of people have dealt with these concepts before, and you really have to start from scratch.

ummonk 7y ago
>Subsequently, you get judgements that are chock full of misconceptions of what FP actually is I put the blame for that squarely on the Haskell cultists. They've caused everyone to have the impression that functional programming needs to have esoteric syntax and lazy evaluation by default. It's like how the Java cultists have ruined OOP.
jasode 7y ago
>My personal belief? We just don't teach it.[...] Grads come out with a 4 year headstart on a non-FP paradigm, I don't agree the lack of proactive education is the reason FP isn't the norm. Your conclusion doesn't take into account the counterfactuals: - C Language took off in popularity despite BASIC/Pascal being the language more often taught in schools - languages like PHP/Javascript/Python/Java all became popular even though prestigious schools like MIT were teaching Scheme/Lisp (before switching to Python in 2009). You don't need school curricula to evangelize programming paradigms because history shows they weren't necessarily the trendsetters anyway. On a related note, consider that programmers are using Git DVCS even though universities don't have formal classes on Git or distributed-version-control. How would Git's usage spread with everybody adopting it be possible if universities aren't teaching it? Indeed, new college grads often lament that schools didn't teach them real-world coding practices such as git commands. Why does Functional Programming in particular need to be taught in schools for it to become a norm but all the other various programming topics do not?
- mbo 7y ago
  > Why does functional programming need to be taught in schools but all the other various programming topics did not? Because I think it is harder for people who have programmed with other paradigms - following an inverse law, most things should get easier to learn with experience, not harder. It's foreign, it's weird, it's back to front. It doesn't have an immediately obvious benefit to what people are used to, and the benefits it has come at scale and up against the wall of complexity (in my opinion). It's hard to adopt upfront. At the small scale it's often painful to use. The syntax is weird. It's aggressively polymorphic, reasoning in abstractions rather than concretions. I could go on (and yet I still adore it). The only reason FP has been successful as it is, is because its evangelists are incredibly vocal, to the point of being fucking annoying sometimes. It's had to be forced down people's throats at times, and frankly, there's no better place to force a paradigm down someone's throats than at a university, where non-compliance comes at academic penalty, and when the mind is most impressionable.
  - z2 7y ago
    Exactly. As just an anecdote, my intro do FP class in university was taught by a professor who tended to rant about different levels of purity and elegance between his favorite and least favorite languages. Of course, the favorite was his pet project and we had to spend most of the class using it. I also know that Emacs is partly written in Lisp because it was the only editor he would touch. FP can't even sell itself well in school as a language where useful things can be done, when the student is stuck in a deep valley of ___morphisms and other alien concepts with claims of aesthetic elegance as the only motivation. I recall the math nerds loved it as relief over C that the rest of the department used, but with me being rather mediocre in math, the weirdness and cult-like vibe from the prof and TA left a really bad taste. The impression was so deep that I have no issues recalling this class a decade later. I've never touched any FP since, unless you count borrowing clever lambda snippets.
    - mbo 7y ago
      The sad part is that this is a common experience - universities have done a bad job at teaching FP. I think there are good pieces of FP education, particularly Learn You a Haskell and https://github.com/data61/fp-course https://github.com/data61/fp-course - friends have gone through these have questioned "why wasn't I taught like this the first time around". > I've never touched any FP since, unless you count borrowing clever lambda snippets. I'd urge you to give it another shot if you have spare time. Even in spite of all the dogshit things associated with it, it's a paradigm I've bet my career on.
DubiousPusher 7y ago
I think you nailed it. But FP proponents have done a fair bit of harm to the paradigm itself in that some of the more osutspoken proponents have been pretty alienating. They've pushed the language superiority argument to death. They should probably be focused on pushing the style in the hopes that the next round of popular languages begins to implement FP style as first class features. Which is of course what the author alludes to and I think is actually happening. Which would jive with history. A lot of what became OO language features arose because people were already using the style in non-OO languages. C being a great example of how you can use a ton of C++ like features, you best end up writing a lot of boiler plate to hook up function pointers and the like. Going back further we see features in C were being implemented by assembly prigrammers as macro assembly. So the pattern the author puts forward has basically held true for multiple shifts in programming paradigms. Which leaves me with one point of contention with the presenter. That OO dominance is not happenstance. And neither was the fact that lots of people were writing OO style C. There is something about OOP that helped people think about their code easier. That's why they adopted the features. Maybe not everything about it was great and we're learning that. But it genuinely helped people. Just as English language oriented languages helped people over ASM.
gambler 7y ago
What a coincidence. This sounds exactly like what happens with OOP. Every discussion here gets swarmed with clueless people who think Java is the apex of OO programming, because that's what gets taught in universities these days. They don't understand any of the core concepts that prompted Xerox Park to develop the OO paradigm in the first place. They aren't aware of any of the relevant research. They operate under the assumption that OO was born out complete ignorance of functional programming, even though people who kick-started its rise were keenly aware of Lisp (for example, Alan Kay frequently references McCarthy's work and research papers in his talks). Etc, etc.
- thomascgalvin 7y ago
  > Every discussion here gets swarmed with clueless people who think Java is the apex of OO programming, because that's what gets taught in universities these days. Realistically, Java (or something very much like it) is the apex of OOP, at least as most people will experience it. The Ur-example of OOP might be a beautiful, internally consistent vision of mathematical purity, but most of us will never experience it. Similarly, Agile-fall is the most common form of Agile that people will experience, which is why we always fall into "no true Scotsman" territory when ~~arguing about~~ discussing it. There is, I think, a disconnect between people who are primarily concerned with the beauty of software - simple models, elegant algorithms, and so on - and the people who are primarily concerned with getting their feature branch merged to master so their manager will let them go to their kid's soccer game. The beauty of software is important, and there's value in trying to bring the useful, but more esoteric concepts of CS into the mainstream, but at the same time we need to be aware of the ground truth of software development.
  - gambler 7y ago
    >Realistically, Java (or something very much like it) is the apex of OOP [...] By this logic Java Streams are the apex of functional programming and anyone who uses them is fully qualified to dismiss the paradigm, even if they don't know anything about proper functional languages.
  - caseymarquis 7y ago
markandrewj 7y ago
Personally, I get frustrated that there seems to be a belief that you can only use FP or OOP, when the reality is both models can be used in conjunction, and there may be reasons to choose one over the other dependent on what you are doing. Not to mention there are other models such as Protocol Oriented Programming. You see this in languages like Swift.
- mbo 7y ago
  The issues is that you get benefits for sticking to one paradigm, because then everything is made of the same stuff. If everything is an object, then you can use all your tooling that works with objects, which is everything. If everything is pure, you get easy parallelism. If everything is an actor, you get easy distributability. If everything is a monad or function, you get easy compositionality. The list goes on. Smalltalk, Erlang and Haskell are languages with very dedicated fan bases, which I theorise is because they went all in on their chosen paradigm.
  - markandrewj 7y ago
    It's true there are benefits to working with in one paradigm, but I find that often you can only do this for so long. This is why you have things like redux-thunk.
  - repolfx 7y ago
    You don't really get easy parallelism, do you? People used to theorise this, but auto-parallelisation never really worked because it's hard to understand - even for a machine - where the cost/benefit tradeoff of parallelism starts to happen. Applying a pure function to a massive list is simply not a common pattern outside of things like multimedia codecs or 3D graphics, where these industries settled on explicitly expressing the data parallelism using SIMD or shaders a long time ago. Functional languages have nothing to add there.
stillwater56 7y ago
I'm just starting to dabble in Scala, and as someone who has actually created lecture content, is there a resource you would particularly recommend?
- mbo 7y ago
  New members of our team are greeted with a "Hi, my name is mbo. Here's your desk, here's your copy of The Red Book, good luck." https://www.manning.com/books/functional-programming-in-scala https://www.manning.com/books/functional-programming-in-scal...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

by mbo 7y ago

ummonk 7y ago

>Subsequently, you get judgements that are chock full of misconceptions of what FP actually is I put the blame for that squarely on the Haskell cultists. They've caused everyone to have the impression that functional programming needs to have esoteric syntax and lazy evaluation by default. It's like how the Java cultists have ruined OOP.

jasode 7y ago

>My personal belief? We just don't teach it.[...] Grads come out with a 4 year headstart on a non-FP paradigm, I don't agree the lack of proactive education is the reason FP isn't the norm. Your conclusion doesn't take into account the counterfactuals: - C Language took off in popularity despite BASIC/Pascal being the language more often taught in schools - languages like PHP/Javascript/Python/Java all became popular even though prestigious schools like MIT were teaching Scheme/Lisp (before switching to Python in 2009). You don't need school curricula to evangelize programming paradigms because history shows they weren't necessarily the trendsetters anyway. On a related note, consider that programmers are using Git DVCS even though universities don't have formal classes on Git or distributed-version-control. How would Git's usage spread with everybody adopting it be possible if universities aren't teaching it? Indeed, new college grads often lament that schools didn't teach them real-world coding practices such as git commands. Why does Functional Programming in particular need to be taught in schools for it to become a norm but all the other various programming topics do not?

mbo 7y ago
> Why does functional programming need to be taught in schools but all the other various programming topics did not? Because I think it is harder for people who have programmed with other paradigms - following an inverse law, most things should get easier to learn with experience, not harder. It's foreign, it's weird, it's back to front. It doesn't have an immediately obvious benefit to what people are used to, and the benefits it has come at scale and up against the wall of complexity (in my opinion). It's hard to adopt upfront. At the small scale it's often painful to use. The syntax is weird. It's aggressively polymorphic, reasoning in abstractions rather than concretions. I could go on (and yet I still adore it). The only reason FP has been successful as it is, is because its evangelists are incredibly vocal, to the point of being fucking annoying sometimes. It's had to be forced down people's throats at times, and frankly, there's no better place to force a paradigm down someone's throats than at a university, where non-compliance comes at academic penalty, and when the mind is most impressionable.
- z2 7y ago
  Exactly. As just an anecdote, my intro do FP class in university was taught by a professor who tended to rant about different levels of purity and elegance between his favorite and least favorite languages. Of course, the favorite was his pet project and we had to spend most of the class using it. I also know that Emacs is partly written in Lisp because it was the only editor he would touch. FP can't even sell itself well in school as a language where useful things can be done, when the student is stuck in a deep valley of ___morphisms and other alien concepts with claims of aesthetic elegance as the only motivation. I recall the math nerds loved it as relief over C that the rest of the department used, but with me being rather mediocre in math, the weirdness and cult-like vibe from the prof and TA left a really bad taste. The impression was so deep that I have no issues recalling this class a decade later. I've never touched any FP since, unless you count borrowing clever lambda snippets.
  - mbo 7y ago
    The sad part is that this is a common experience - universities have done a bad job at teaching FP. I think there are good pieces of FP education, particularly Learn You a Haskell and https://github.com/data61/fp-course https://github.com/data61/fp-course - friends have gone through these have questioned "why wasn't I taught like this the first time around". > I've never touched any FP since, unless you count borrowing clever lambda snippets. I'd urge you to give it another shot if you have spare time. Even in spite of all the dogshit things associated with it, it's a paradigm I've bet my career on.

DubiousPusher 7y ago

I think you nailed it. But FP proponents have done a fair bit of harm to the paradigm itself in that some of the more osutspoken proponents have been pretty alienating. They've pushed the language superiority argument to death. They should probably be focused on pushing the style in the hopes that the next round of popular languages begins to implement FP style as first class features. Which is of course what the author alludes to and I think is actually happening. Which would jive with history. A lot of what became OO language features arose because people were already using the style in non-OO languages. C being a great example of how you can use a ton of C++ like features, you best end up writing a lot of boiler plate to hook up function pointers and the like. Going back further we see features in C were being implemented by assembly prigrammers as macro assembly. So the pattern the author puts forward has basically held true for multiple shifts in programming paradigms. Which leaves me with one point of contention with the presenter. That OO dominance is not happenstance. And neither was the fact that lots of people were writing OO style C. There is something about OOP that helped people think about their code easier. That's why they adopted the features. Maybe not everything about it was great and we're learning that. But it genuinely helped people. Just as English language oriented languages helped people over ASM.

gambler 7y ago

What a coincidence. This sounds exactly like what happens with OOP. Every discussion here gets swarmed with clueless people who think Java is the apex of OO programming, because that's what gets taught in universities these days. They don't understand any of the core concepts that prompted Xerox Park to develop the OO paradigm in the first place. They aren't aware of any of the relevant research. They operate under the assumption that OO was born out complete ignorance of functional programming, even though people who kick-started its rise were keenly aware of Lisp (for example, Alan Kay frequently references McCarthy's work and research papers in his talks). Etc, etc.

thomascgalvin 7y ago
> Every discussion here gets swarmed with clueless people who think Java is the apex of OO programming, because that's what gets taught in universities these days. Realistically, Java (or something very much like it) is the apex of OOP, at least as most people will experience it. The Ur-example of OOP might be a beautiful, internally consistent vision of mathematical purity, but most of us will never experience it. Similarly, Agile-fall is the most common form of Agile that people will experience, which is why we always fall into "no true Scotsman" territory when ~~arguing about~~ discussing it. There is, I think, a disconnect between people who are primarily concerned with the beauty of software - simple models, elegant algorithms, and so on - and the people who are primarily concerned with getting their feature branch merged to master so their manager will let them go to their kid's soccer game. The beauty of software is important, and there's value in trying to bring the useful, but more esoteric concepts of CS into the mainstream, but at the same time we need to be aware of the ground truth of software development.
- gambler 7y ago
  >Realistically, Java (or something very much like it) is the apex of OOP [...] By this logic Java Streams are the apex of functional programming and anyone who uses them is fully qualified to dismiss the paradigm, even if they don't know anything about proper functional languages.
- caseymarquis 7y ago

markandrewj 7y ago

Personally, I get frustrated that there seems to be a belief that you can only use FP or OOP, when the reality is both models can be used in conjunction, and there may be reasons to choose one over the other dependent on what you are doing. Not to mention there are other models such as Protocol Oriented Programming. You see this in languages like Swift.

mbo 7y ago
The issues is that you get benefits for sticking to one paradigm, because then everything is made of the same stuff. If everything is an object, then you can use all your tooling that works with objects, which is everything. If everything is pure, you get easy parallelism. If everything is an actor, you get easy distributability. If everything is a monad or function, you get easy compositionality. The list goes on. Smalltalk, Erlang and Haskell are languages with very dedicated fan bases, which I theorise is because they went all in on their chosen paradigm.
- markandrewj 7y ago
  It's true there are benefits to working with in one paradigm, but I find that often you can only do this for so long. This is why you have things like redux-thunk.
- repolfx 7y ago
  You don't really get easy parallelism, do you? People used to theorise this, but auto-parallelisation never really worked because it's hard to understand - even for a machine - where the cost/benefit tradeoff of parallelism starts to happen. Applying a pure function to a massive list is simply not a common pattern outside of things like multimedia codecs or 3D graphics, where these industries settled on explicitly expressing the data parallelism using SIMD or shaders a long time ago. Functional languages have nothing to add there.

stillwater56 7y ago

I'm just starting to dabble in Scala, and as someone who has actually created lecture content, is there a resource you would particularly recommend?

mbo 7y ago
New members of our team are greeted with a "Hi, my name is mbo. Here's your desk, here's your copy of The Red Book, good luck." https://www.manning.com/books/functional-programming-in-scala https://www.manning.com/books/functional-programming-in-scal...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]