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Speaking as an author who deliberately chose to use JavaScript as the language of communication... I both agree and disagree with you. It is nearly impossible

Speaking as an author who deliberately chose to use JavaScript as the language of communication... I both agree and disagree with you. It is nearly impossible to make one post that communicates strongly to all audiences. If you use an example problem simple enough to be understood by everyone, you almost certainly give up some of the nuänces that would be surfaced by a more complex problem to solve. Likewise, using a language like JavaScript that is popular but doesn't embrace modern FP, you necessarily end up reinventing a lot of wheels like composition and chaining and partial application. This can be very instructive for the newcomer, but is nothing but incidental complexity for the more experienced functional programmer. In the end, I think the world benefits from authors not trying to be all things to all people. We all win if there are a variety of posts about a similar subject, using different languages and solving different complexities of problem. So yes, 100% this post is not going to meet a lot of programmers' needs. But if there is some set of programmers--no matter how small--for whom it is a good fit, then let's agree that it's valuable and well-written for iuts target audience.

diegoperini 7y ago
I totally agree with you. Nobody is obliged to satisfy all audiences. Just to make it explicit; I'm not suggesting Javascript for communicating this type of posts. Without strong typing, this kind of refactoring will immediately become a spaghetti of screaming ducks. Defunctionalisation is a not-so-rare pattern to encounter and I humbly think choosing a non C-like language to explain it is a waste of opportunity to introduce it to people who can benefit it most (i.e network programmers, game scripting tools programmers, distributed systems programmers etc).
pm90 7y ago
Alas the all seeing eye of hacker news prevents many would be writers from publishing their findings. Even the theoretical chance of being criticized on hacker news is an oft cited reason that I’ve heard from many coworkers for not publishing interesting findings.
- diegoperini 7y ago
  This type of attitude suggests all criticism is bad which I believe is not true at all. No serious writer would hold science back because of a probable debate in some random internet forum. Otherwise, they don't understand how science works. The discussion in this comment section (for this post) is so far friendly. The author is kindly giving up personal time to engage with the readers. There are even people who posted real code pieces to elaborate the topic for people who had hard time to follow. If this is not HN at its best, I don't know what is.

diegoperini 7y ago

I totally agree with you. Nobody is obliged to satisfy all audiences. Just to make it explicit; I'm not suggesting Javascript for communicating this type of posts. Without strong typing, this kind of refactoring will immediately become a spaghetti of screaming ducks. Defunctionalisation is a not-so-rare pattern to encounter and I humbly think choosing a non C-like language to explain it is a waste of opportunity to introduce it to people who can benefit it most (i.e network programmers, game scripting tools programmers, distributed systems programmers etc).

pm90 7y ago

Alas the all seeing eye of hacker news prevents many would be writers from publishing their findings. Even the theoretical chance of being criticized on hacker news is an oft cited reason that I’ve heard from many coworkers for not publishing interesting findings.

diegoperini 7y ago
This type of attitude suggests all criticism is bad which I believe is not true at all. No serious writer would hold science back because of a probable debate in some random internet forum. Otherwise, they don't understand how science works. The discussion in this comment section (for this post) is so far friendly. The author is kindly giving up personal time to engage with the readers. There are even people who posted real code pieces to elaborate the topic for people who had hard time to follow. If this is not HN at its best, I don't know what is.