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What is it with functional advocates and their obsession with brevity to the point of reductivism, and lack of visual structure
by weego 6y ago
What is it with functional advocates and their obsession with brevity to the point of reductivism, and lack of visual structure
- kccqzy 6y agoSuccinctness is power. Paul Graham explained this way better than I could: http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html On the other hand I don't agree with your point about visual structure. Personally I believe visual structure is mostly about code indentation. Visual structure can be apparent in any language, functional or not.
- striking 6y agoI don't understand. It looks a little like Ruby and Elixir mixed together, maybe without some colons that would otherwise be there. There's nothing crazy going on in the examples in the way of single letter variables or anything else I'd consider reductive. It's not really all that novel, and more of a pleasing combination of existing ideas. So why pin this on "functional advocates", whatever "this" even is? Maybe you could expound on your ideas a bit to help me understand your reasoning. Perhaps your comment is just incomplete rather than being wrong. (also, hopefully your qualms go further in depth than the syntax, because literally-skin-deep comparisons are a little boring)
- cryptoquick 6y agoThey're a cult of aesthetics. FP is just one tool in the toolbox. And for most things, it's the wrong tool.
- mumblemumble 6y agoInteresting. I agree that FP does have a bit too much fun with code golf, but I found the code examples in the article to be very clearly structured, readable, and not at all terse. Is it possible that your perception of a lack of structure is down to a lack of familiarity with the syntax and idioms in ML-style languages? I could see where perhaps not knowing what parts of the code are syntactic and what parts are stylistic causes it all to fade to gray. I've noticed a phenomenon along these lines when people are learning lisp: non-lispers and lisp learners tend to see nothing but parenthesis, because that's the most visually distinctive feature of lisp code compared to other syntaxes. More experienced lisp programmers, on the other hand, have a tendency to just tune them out. In well-formatted code, the parens themselves have very low information density, so you don't necessarily get a lot of value out of scrutinizing them.
- tomp 6y agoWhat do you mean? The code example is more verbose than Python, and has about as much structure.
- dnautics 6y agowhat's the equivalent python? (must include async, and proper error handling over the async connections). I'll give you a break on the "not parallelizing if it's got datapath dependencies".