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I know what I’m doing in many languages, and I’m uniformly more productive with the FP ones. The only time I’ll reach for a non-FP language is if I’m forced to
by wyager 5y ago
I know what I’m doing in many languages, and I’m uniformly more productive with the FP ones. The only time I’ll reach for a non-FP language is if I’m forced to for work or if I’m working on an embedded system with no allocator.
- taeric 5y agoIs this confirmation/survivor bias, though? I would love to know that there is a panacea that automatically improves productivity. Unfortunately, I haven't seen one in my career, as yet. I am certainly more happy in many functional languages. And I can see happiness contributing to some. But I can't count that as data, without RCTs or something similar. I'm not going to go so far as to claim that computer science isn't science. But I do fear that there are more claims than there are checks in our industry.
- wyager 5y agoI wouldn’t say it “automatically improves productivity” - I suspect it might be limited to more intelligent and/or mathematically inclined programmers. That said, I think for many programmers not using it is a huge and pointless missed opportunity. This is one of those visibly high-return arbitrages that it pains me to see go unexploited.
- taeric 5y agoI certainly don't want my criticism to be a call to avoid functional programming. I just get an uneasy feeling when I see it over sold, as well.
- js4ever 5y ago"mathematically inclined programmers." This kind of programmers are literally the worst I met in 25 years of carreer. They are underperforming very badly compared to others.
- wyager 5y agoBased on your username I’m guessing you’re a web dev programmer of some kind? I wouldn’t expect that to match well with math-oriented people.
- js4ever 5y agoIn fact I worked mainly with java and .NET C# in the past 2 decades ... Now I'm more into Node and Javascript ... I worked mainly in finance, banks and insurances. This is where I met all those underperforming math-oriented peoples. Most of the time they where not able to find a job in their field and went to programming as a way to earn money, not by passion like ALL the best engineers I met.
- m_arnold 5y ago>I would love to know that there is a panacea that automatically improves productivity. Unfortunately, I haven't seen one in my career, as yet. I suspect you've seen many of them. They're just the ones that are so normal you don't notice anymore. For instance, no one does pure waterfall-style project management anymore. "goto" programming has completely dissappeared. Etc.
- fulafel 5y agoWhat are your criteria for qualifying as automatic productivity improvement? Would garbage collection vs manual memory management count?