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I think it's a super hot take because the real world has demonstrated (over and over again) that a huge portion of professional software developers have no inte

by verall 5y ago

I think it's a super hot take because the real world has demonstrated (over and over again) that a huge portion of professional software developers have no interest in learning functional paradigms just to write some config files. Just like a huge portion of professional software developers have no interest in learning RTL or digital logic just to program an FPGA. HLS is a massively complex system to solve this problem. People will also build massively complex systems to solve the problem of "No FP here, please".

klekticist 5y ago
I agree with your point here, though imo it's worth drawing a distinction between the FP concepts the language designers / implementors must understand and the FP concepts the language users must understand. Ideally languages prevent bug classes like null deref, use after free while still being familiar enough for most programmers to use. It's analogous to the spectrum of SQL knowledge folks have. For instance knowing what a group by does vs how a group by reshuffles data on a single node / across nodes. Ideally the language design hides the hard details. A very tall order admittedly.
mixedCase 5y ago
That'd be fine if it was just config files, but that's not the problem now isn't it?. It's an enormous amount of problem domains that FP handles trivially and is a complete pain to manage imperatively. We've had entire groups of people coming up with ridiculous ideas like replacing relational databases with key-value stores for relational data just because they find SQL "icky" because it fits a mental model they never developed (syntax issues with SQL aside) and it isn't until they're hand rolling data aggregation that they realize the mess they got themselves into. Which is why I stand by what I said: this knowledge is not optional, and engineers not willing to learn them are going to be stuck with sub-optimal tools, dragging the whole industry down with them. While I can't be confident this is the definitive solution, I believe that the best way to move forward is to start treating basic FP (purity, data transformation pipelines, immutability, favoring data structures over code) as a baseline that everyone needs to know to work as a developer, and stop treating it as if it is on a superior level of difficulty compared to learning whatever bullshit combination of half-templated server side rendering, 4D DOMs and incantations needed to upgrade Webpack we need to know to be "up to speed" nowadays.
staticassertion 5y ago
> (over and over again) Eh. I'm not saying one way or the other that FP is good or bad, but the software industry is incredibly young and changes a lot. Even in a relatively short period - 10 years, let's say - things are pretty difference. 20 years, still a short time, and things are radically different. And on top of that, it is still the case that a lot of stuff takes a long time to get adopted. It's hard to build and popularize a programming language, regardless of how good or bad that language is, because they tend to lack interoperability with other languages if they're very different, which is usually a requirement if they want to be considered worth looking at. So I'd just as easily buy that people haven't used a lot of FP due to inertia, a lack of the right external inventives, etc, and not by any virtue of the paradigm.

by verall 5y ago

klekticist 5y ago

I agree with your point here, though imo it's worth drawing a distinction between the FP concepts the language designers / implementors must understand and the FP concepts the language users must understand. Ideally languages prevent bug classes like null deref, use after free while still being familiar enough for most programmers to use. It's analogous to the spectrum of SQL knowledge folks have. For instance knowing what a group by does vs how a group by reshuffles data on a single node / across nodes. Ideally the language design hides the hard details. A very tall order admittedly.

mixedCase 5y ago

That'd be fine if it was just config files, but that's not the problem now isn't it?. It's an enormous amount of problem domains that FP handles trivially and is a complete pain to manage imperatively. We've had entire groups of people coming up with ridiculous ideas like replacing relational databases with key-value stores for relational data just because they find SQL "icky" because it fits a mental model they never developed (syntax issues with SQL aside) and it isn't until they're hand rolling data aggregation that they realize the mess they got themselves into. Which is why I stand by what I said: this knowledge is not optional, and engineers not willing to learn them are going to be stuck with sub-optimal tools, dragging the whole industry down with them. While I can't be confident this is the definitive solution, I believe that the best way to move forward is to start treating basic FP (purity, data transformation pipelines, immutability, favoring data structures over code) as a baseline that everyone needs to know to work as a developer, and stop treating it as if it is on a superior level of difficulty compared to learning whatever bullshit combination of half-templated server side rendering, 4D DOMs and incantations needed to upgrade Webpack we need to know to be "up to speed" nowadays.

staticassertion 5y ago

> (over and over again) Eh. I'm not saying one way or the other that FP is good or bad, but the software industry is incredibly young and changes a lot. Even in a relatively short period - 10 years, let's say - things are pretty difference. 20 years, still a short time, and things are radically different. And on top of that, it is still the case that a lot of stuff takes a long time to get adopted. It's hard to build and popularize a programming language, regardless of how good or bad that language is, because they tend to lack interoperability with other languages if they're very different, which is usually a requirement if they want to be considered worth looking at. So I'd just as easily buy that people haven't used a lot of FP due to inertia, a lack of the right external inventives, etc, and not by any virtue of the paradigm.