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> If you don't care about purity don't use FP. This is unhelpful. I don’t know if I’ve ever encountered this attitude before, I’m enthusiastic about FP and I f
by eyelidlessness 5y ago
> If you don't care about purity don't use FP.
This is unhelpful. I don’t know if I’ve ever encountered this attitude before, I’m enthusiastic about FP and I frequently direct people toward FP principles wherever I possibly can. Dissuading application of those principles in part because they’re not applied in (your view of) full is sending people in the wrong direction.
And you might not care, but I do: it’s also gatekeeping. Making people feel like what they’ve learned to make their code more functional, less side-effecting, and generally easier to reason about… making them feel like that’s not important progress they can value unless they share your knowledge and understanding of Category Theory or whatever is going to drive people away from what you want. And it’s going to drive marginalized people away most, probably from programming in general. That stinks.
The level of purity you’re demanding isn’t even claimed by most functional languages. And the ones which do use Monads as a sleight of hand to make the claim, but that’s plainly a useful fiction.
- flowerlad 5y ago> > If you don't care about purity don't use FP. > This is unhelpful. You have to care about purity. The benefits of FP hinges on this. Saying you don't care about purity is the same as saying you don't care about FP. That doesn't mean that anything less than "perfect purity" is worthless. You have to always aim for purity, even if you don't always achieve it, because without it there is no FP.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago> That doesn't mean that anything less than "perfect purity" is worthless. This is more helpful. I’m not going to add my own unhelpful reaction to the rest of what you said, I think I already added more value above than I’m inclined to now.