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I would. Instead of properly managing mutable state (which can be difficult in situations with growing teams and complex application logic) people are opting t

I would. Instead of properly managing mutable state (which can be difficult in situations with growing teams and complex application logic) people are opting to just copy everything or copy a subset of the tree they need so they don't have to think about it. Immutability is bad for performance when the purpose is not recalculating a certain state after a certain number of operations(memoization). Many of the best practices that have cropped up in the past few years has been more for helping teams of people deal with growing code bases rather than helping programmers deal with limited hardware. In computer science this should be self explanatory. For optimal runtimes the act of making copies is avoided. Why people usually seem to ignore the fact that they're wasting cycles for the sake of the holy grail of clean, functional programming and immutability has eluded me. Typescript, focus on immutability, microservices even. I hate all of them but they have their purposes. They solve people problems. Maximizing hardware performance is not in the list though.

slmjkdbtl 5y ago
Yeah now I wouldn't use immutable structure in an performance intensive application, but I do _hope_ one day we have some cycles to spare and can use it without worrying too much. To me it's like garbage collection, it's nice to have if we can afford some performance cost.
rackjack 5y ago
Abstraction is at the core of programming... complaining about people not "properly managing mutable state" is like complaining about choosing Java over C because they're not "properly" managing memory and instead using a garbage collector. Maximizing hardware performance is, truth be told, largely irrelevant for the vast majority of applications. If they can meet their goals/deadlines/whatever, you can call them lazy, but I think most would call them efficient. Though I must admit, every time my browser lags when viewing what SHOULD be a static site, I do die a little inside.

slmjkdbtl 5y ago

Yeah now I wouldn't use immutable structure in an performance intensive application, but I do _hope_ one day we have some cycles to spare and can use it without worrying too much. To me it's like garbage collection, it's nice to have if we can afford some performance cost.

rackjack 5y ago

Abstraction is at the core of programming... complaining about people not "properly managing mutable state" is like complaining about choosing Java over C because they're not "properly" managing memory and instead using a garbage collector. Maximizing hardware performance is, truth be told, largely irrelevant for the vast majority of applications. If they can meet their goals/deadlines/whatever, you can call them lazy, but I think most would call them efficient. Though I must admit, every time my browser lags when viewing what SHOULD be a static site, I do die a little inside.