3 ms·

Why not just use a functional language? Elixir and Clojure are dynamic like Ruby.

• fulafel 6y ago
  That would need a rewrite from scratch instead of the described refactoring and introducing more functional concepts.
  • blunte 6y ago
    I wonder what the possibilities would be if using jruby to interoperate with clojure.
    • adenozine 6y ago
      Oooo, yeah that's an interesting one. Especially with clojure's macros, surely there's some cool possibilities
• eyelidlessness 6y ago
  There are lots of reasons to choose an imperative language and write functional code in it. Ecosystem, familiarity, quality of documentation, likelihood of finding helpful solutions on the web, hiring pool. I could go on. I spent a few years working in Clojure, and I’m glad I did. It taught me to think in FP. Now I use those same FP techniques in a language I vastly prefer overall (TypeScript). There’s really very little reason not to write functional or mostly-functional code in any language.
  • cutler 6y ago
    Why would you prefer Typescript over, say, Clojurescript if functional is your priority? It's the immutability that matters in functional. Typescript is just a better way to manage mutable code.
    • eyelidlessness 6y ago
      > Why would you prefer Typescript over, say, Clojurescript if functional is your priority? Because the benefits of a powerful static type system (type checking, documentation, refactoring) are also a priority. I’ve used ClojureScript extensively, and shipped cljs projects in production. But one of the problems I encountered frequently was completely inexplicable behavior when I mistakenly passed incompatible values to core functions. Absolutely bonkers errors or silent failures I had to track deep into the inner recesses of cljs.core etc, generally having to reverse engineer the advanced compilation to understand what had happened. When I filed bugs on cases like this, eg asking for a meaningful runtime error, they were without exception closed as WONTFIX with snooty notes like “just don’t pass incompatible values to core functions”. While I’m quite a fan of TDD, even my extensive coverage would sometimes fail to catch issues like that. But TypeScript routinely catches them for me. > It's the immutability that matters in functional. I believe the ML family of languages would strongly disagree... > Typescript is just a better way to manage mutable code. TypeScript is a better way to catch type errors in JavaScript, mutable and immutable alike. But it does help enforce immutability if you use `readonly`/`as const` extensively, which I do. Sure, I’d vastly prefer immutability was the default. But it’s a small price to pay for such huge productivity and safety improvements.