4 ms·

I wish people would quit propagating this hostile view of functional programmers. The vast majority of them — even in academia — are happy to never mention or e

I wish people would quit propagating this hostile view of functional programmers. The vast majority of them — even in academia — are happy to never mention or even fully learn about the scary math words, and most of those who _do_ learn about them work really hard to not make the community unwelcoming to those who don't know or don't want to know. But the reputation precedes, which causes people to avoid it altogether, which is really a shame. The whole "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the big deal?"-in-a-condescending-tone bit comes from "A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages": a satirical blog post from 2009 (http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...). It is not indicative of the general community, but the joke has been reproduced enough that people who don't know anything will encounter it, think the practitioners are serious about it, and write off the whole thing as unwelcoming. It's a bummer.

hinkley 4y ago
It would help if functional didn’t collect all the people with their heads all the way up their own asses. Functional has more shibboleths than anybody except maybe professional consulting groups like IBM GS. You can’t have exclusive language and then be surprised when nobody wants to worship at the altar of your obfuscation. ETA: Look. I was reading 25 year old complaints about why Lisp isn’t popular 25 years ago. You can go on scratching your heads for another 25 years or you can start taking criticism instead of deflecting.
- DonaldPShimoda 4y ago
  > ETA: Look. I was reading 25 year old complaints about why Lisp isn’t popular 25 years ago. You can go on scratching your heads for another 25 years or you can start taking criticism instead of deflecting. Is this... directed at me? Are you saying that I've been guilty of this behavior? Could you point me to an example? Because I put a lot of effort into helping the functional programming community be more welcoming, so it'd be important to me to know if I've gone astray somewhere. > It would help if functional didn’t collect all the people with their heads all the way up their own asses. I don't disagree that the kind of people who like to be particularly condescending tend to also end up in this community. That said, I will point out: (a) there are still plenty of assholes in non-functional (or even anti-functional) communities, and (b) the community has grown a lot over the years, and has mostly shifted to being much more positive and inclusive. Unfortunately, the reputation from decades ago is still strong, and I honestly believe part of that is due to historically-justified propagation from people like you in this comment and the other person in the comment to which I originally replied, to name two examples. There's a lot of residual hostility against the FP community that I don't think is truthfully justifiable anymore.

hinkley 4y ago

It would help if functional didn’t collect all the people with their heads all the way up their own asses. Functional has more shibboleths than anybody except maybe professional consulting groups like IBM GS. You can’t have exclusive language and then be surprised when nobody wants to worship at the altar of your obfuscation. ETA: Look. I was reading 25 year old complaints about why Lisp isn’t popular 25 years ago. You can go on scratching your heads for another 25 years or you can start taking criticism instead of deflecting.

DonaldPShimoda 4y ago
> ETA: Look. I was reading 25 year old complaints about why Lisp isn’t popular 25 years ago. You can go on scratching your heads for another 25 years or you can start taking criticism instead of deflecting. Is this... directed at me? Are you saying that I've been guilty of this behavior? Could you point me to an example? Because I put a lot of effort into helping the functional programming community be more welcoming, so it'd be important to me to know if I've gone astray somewhere. > It would help if functional didn’t collect all the people with their heads all the way up their own asses. I don't disagree that the kind of people who like to be particularly condescending tend to also end up in this community. That said, I will point out: (a) there are still plenty of assholes in non-functional (or even anti-functional) communities, and (b) the community has grown a lot over the years, and has mostly shifted to being much more positive and inclusive. Unfortunately, the reputation from decades ago is still strong, and I honestly believe part of that is due to historically-justified propagation from people like you in this comment and the other person in the comment to which I originally replied, to name two examples. There's a lot of residual hostility against the FP community that I don't think is truthfully justifiable anymore.