5 ms·

How do you distinguish between people who are in a religious fervor and people who have figured out that something is obviously beneficial?

jjav 4y ago
> How do you distinguish between people who are in a religious fervor and people who have figured out that something is obviously beneficial? Seems easy to me. If it's obviously benefitial, show me: - Performance benchmarks showing how much faster the compiled code runs - Case studies demonstrating faster development and/or fewer time spent debugging - Studies showing consistently better maintainability If it is lacking this data, it comes across as religious fervor.
- knaekhoved 4y ago
  If you believe in the epistemic power of "studies" to convey useful information in these domains, I have bad news for you - you are the one in a religious fervor. The only semi-objective metric you've proposed is compiled code performance, which is a fairly small component of most people's utility function, especially when the difference disappears in all but numerical-computation-centric applications.
fsdjkflsjfsoij 4y ago
> people who have figured out that something is obviously beneficial? If it's so beneficial then those people can prove it by building something exceptional. I worked with Haskell and Scala for almost a decade and libraries were full of bugs and performance problems. A lot of bugs just hadn't been reported because so few people were using them. FP certainly has its strengths but so far there's very little evidence that it produces better software in the long term.
- epgui 4y ago
  In life, there are a lot of obvious things that are very difficult to teach. For example, I'm a biochemist with 12 years of education, and I can't seem to be able to convince anyone that vaccines are safer than no vaccines. Humans just don't like new things or changing their mind, and that's a very generalizable fact, even among very smart groups of intelligent engineers.
  - blep_ 4y ago
    The typical argument for vaccines is much less shaky than the typical argument for pure FP. For one, vaccine people can actually explain why vaccines are good. FP people seem to mostly just repeat variations on "it's easier to reason about" and showing trivial functions that are generally not easier to reason about. Imagine trying to get people to accept vaccines, but in a world where we have other types of medicine that usually works well enough for all the things you've developed vaccines for, and the only argument you're allowed to make is "it's obviously better, look at how amazingly liquid the stuff in this syringe is". You'll still get some resistance, but in our current world, pure FP is much more of a niche thing than pro-vaccine stances. There's a reason for that.
    - knaekhoved 4y ago
      > The typical argument for vaccines is much less shaky than the typical argument for pure FP. I suspect you aren't that knowledgeable about either. > For one, vaccine people can actually explain why vaccines are good. Unless you have a very particular background, I'm suspicious that you can actually follow the frontier of that argument. More likely, you're getting the ELI5 explanation. > FP people seem to mostly just repeat variations on "it's easier to reason about" and showing trivial functions that are generally not easier to reason about. Well-designed FP languages reify coherent low-complexity formal semantics. When FP advocates say "reason about", they mean in a (semi-)formal sense. No popular imperative language has any kind of denotational semantics, so good luck reasoning about the compositional behavior of C++ libraries, unless your definition of "reason about" is "think about informally".
      - sidlls 4y ago
        > Unless you have a very particular background, I'm suspicious that you can actually follow the frontier of that argument. More likely, you're getting the ELI5 explanation. People who actually understand complex things are able to provide ELI5 level explanations for people who haven't the background for more rigor. You're presenting a false representation of the OP's comment anyway: it never suggested the explanation for why vaccines are good required "frontier" level discourse. > Well-designed FP languages reify coherent low-complexity formal semantics. This is such a great example of what so many of us have noted about FP evangelists. It's so divorced from writing software as to be gibberish.
- knaekhoved 4y ago
  > there's very little evidence that it produces better software in the long term. Have you used other software? 99% of it is dogshit. > libraries were full of bugs and performance problems This is a really wild claim to me. IDK about Scala, but libraries in Haskell, Ocaml, and Elixir are all vastly better than libraries in C++, Java, Python, despite a smaller userbase.
goostavos 4y ago
>figured out that something is obviously beneficial? Case in point for the problem with FP communication. When you speak in smug absolutes, it comes off as religion. I'm pretty big into the FP world. I love Purescript. I dig Idris and exploring dependent types. I spend a lot of time at work teaching "functional" thinking. And yet, I still find most "hard core" FP evangelists insufferable for smugly explaining things as "obviously beneficial." ugh. That is a lots that sucks about pure FP. It's not all upsides. The FP community can do a lot better at "evangelizing" by talking like engineers rather than sales people.
- knaekhoved 4y ago
  Where did I say that FP was obviously beneficial? You're reading too much into my question. I was questioning the GP's epistemology. > talking like engineers rather than sales people. They do talk like this - go to any Haskell conference and it's 90% engineering papers - much better than e.g. a JS conference. It's just that most people don't even know what PL engineering even looks like, let alone how to interpret it.
  - _dain_ 4y ago
    > Where did I say that FP was obviously beneficial? You're reading too much into my question. I was questioning the GP's epistemology. cmon fuckin guy
    - knaekhoved 4y ago
      Care to elaborate? You literally wrote 3 words

jjav 4y ago

> How do you distinguish between people who are in a religious fervor and people who have figured out that something is obviously beneficial? Seems easy to me. If it's obviously benefitial, show me: - Performance benchmarks showing how much faster the compiled code runs - Case studies demonstrating faster development and/or fewer time spent debugging - Studies showing consistently better maintainability If it is lacking this data, it comes across as religious fervor.

knaekhoved 4y ago
If you believe in the epistemic power of "studies" to convey useful information in these domains, I have bad news for you - you are the one in a religious fervor. The only semi-objective metric you've proposed is compiled code performance, which is a fairly small component of most people's utility function, especially when the difference disappears in all but numerical-computation-centric applications.

fsdjkflsjfsoij 4y ago

> people who have figured out that something is obviously beneficial? If it's so beneficial then those people can prove it by building something exceptional. I worked with Haskell and Scala for almost a decade and libraries were full of bugs and performance problems. A lot of bugs just hadn't been reported because so few people were using them. FP certainly has its strengths but so far there's very little evidence that it produces better software in the long term.

epgui 4y ago
In life, there are a lot of obvious things that are very difficult to teach. For example, I'm a biochemist with 12 years of education, and I can't seem to be able to convince anyone that vaccines are safer than no vaccines. Humans just don't like new things or changing their mind, and that's a very generalizable fact, even among very smart groups of intelligent engineers.
- blep_ 4y ago
  The typical argument for vaccines is much less shaky than the typical argument for pure FP. For one, vaccine people can actually explain why vaccines are good. FP people seem to mostly just repeat variations on "it's easier to reason about" and showing trivial functions that are generally not easier to reason about. Imagine trying to get people to accept vaccines, but in a world where we have other types of medicine that usually works well enough for all the things you've developed vaccines for, and the only argument you're allowed to make is "it's obviously better, look at how amazingly liquid the stuff in this syringe is". You'll still get some resistance, but in our current world, pure FP is much more of a niche thing than pro-vaccine stances. There's a reason for that.
  - knaekhoved 4y ago
    > The typical argument for vaccines is much less shaky than the typical argument for pure FP. I suspect you aren't that knowledgeable about either. > For one, vaccine people can actually explain why vaccines are good. Unless you have a very particular background, I'm suspicious that you can actually follow the frontier of that argument. More likely, you're getting the ELI5 explanation. > FP people seem to mostly just repeat variations on "it's easier to reason about" and showing trivial functions that are generally not easier to reason about. Well-designed FP languages reify coherent low-complexity formal semantics. When FP advocates say "reason about", they mean in a (semi-)formal sense. No popular imperative language has any kind of denotational semantics, so good luck reasoning about the compositional behavior of C++ libraries, unless your definition of "reason about" is "think about informally".
    - sidlls 4y ago
      > Unless you have a very particular background, I'm suspicious that you can actually follow the frontier of that argument. More likely, you're getting the ELI5 explanation. People who actually understand complex things are able to provide ELI5 level explanations for people who haven't the background for more rigor. You're presenting a false representation of the OP's comment anyway: it never suggested the explanation for why vaccines are good required "frontier" level discourse. > Well-designed FP languages reify coherent low-complexity formal semantics. This is such a great example of what so many of us have noted about FP evangelists. It's so divorced from writing software as to be gibberish.
knaekhoved 4y ago
> there's very little evidence that it produces better software in the long term. Have you used other software? 99% of it is dogshit. > libraries were full of bugs and performance problems This is a really wild claim to me. IDK about Scala, but libraries in Haskell, Ocaml, and Elixir are all vastly better than libraries in C++, Java, Python, despite a smaller userbase.

goostavos 4y ago

>figured out that something is obviously beneficial? Case in point for the problem with FP communication. When you speak in smug absolutes, it comes off as religion. I'm pretty big into the FP world. I love Purescript. I dig Idris and exploring dependent types. I spend a lot of time at work teaching "functional" thinking. And yet, I still find most "hard core" FP evangelists insufferable for smugly explaining things as "obviously beneficial." ugh. That is a lots that sucks about pure FP. It's not all upsides. The FP community can do a lot better at "evangelizing" by talking like engineers rather than sales people.

knaekhoved 4y ago
Where did I say that FP was obviously beneficial? You're reading too much into my question. I was questioning the GP's epistemology. > talking like engineers rather than sales people. They do talk like this - go to any Haskell conference and it's 90% engineering papers - much better than e.g. a JS conference. It's just that most people don't even know what PL engineering even looks like, let alone how to interpret it.
- _dain_ 4y ago
  > Where did I say that FP was obviously beneficial? You're reading too much into my question. I was questioning the GP's epistemology. cmon fuckin guy
  - knaekhoved 4y ago
    Care to elaborate? You literally wrote 3 words