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I'm sick of the functional programming people telling us that they are better than we are. I have written lines of code in Scheme, Haskell, and Common Lisp. I

I'm sick of the functional programming people telling us that they are better than we are. I have written lines of code in Scheme, Haskell, and Common Lisp. I regularly code in Clojure. I like writing in functional languages too. But every language makes trade-offs. The imperative languages generally try to optimize for readability and speed. The functional languages are often optimized for expression, the ability to easily express yourself to the interpreter or compiler. There is a trade-off though. These languages all trade high expressibility for slow execution times and steep learning curves. This trade-off might well be worth the effort especially if the team is small but it is a trade-off. It's not like it's objectively better to always program in the functional languages.

c3534l 6y ago
Most people are already familiar with procedural programming. If you want to grow as a developer, don't just learn more of the same, learns something that challenges you to work in a different way. If I only knew functional programming, I don't think I'd understand half of what I understand now. It's the fact that they accomplish the same things in very different ways that allows me to see what it is I'm really trying to achieve in programming and see different ways of doing that. The author even goes so far as to call these niche. That's what they are: weird little languages that do things very differently from what you're used to. There is no air of superiority in the linked article.
hajile 6y ago
Common Lisp doesn't belong on that list as it isn't particularly functional in general and is rather fast. You can have expressive, easy to read, and performant, but most people have never seen StandardML before.