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Love expression-oriented pseudo-FP (F#, Scala, Rust), but I think this recent trend of trying to shoehorn Haskell-lite features into mainstream imperative langu

Love expression-oriented pseudo-FP (F#, Scala, Rust), but I think this recent trend of trying to shoehorn Haskell-lite features into mainstream imperative languages is, to put it gently, extremely awkward. That said, I actually do remember my first exposure to Golang being a blog post about using monads to avoid incessantly typing `if err != nil`. Very much like that original author, my personal values in software engineering just don't align with Go at all, and that should be OK!

osclarto 3y ago
totally agree, for me golang is a strongly imperative language and that's ok. I'm willing to be proved wrong, but I would imagine if you want to do functional programming it's going to be a lot easier to just use a different language.
- dingnuts 3y ago
  Big time agreement here as well. I'm biased because I've built a career on Go at this point but the pragmatism and ability to just get things done in Go without faffing about with unnecessary abstractions is I think one of the strongest practical demonstrations of how incredible an imperative language can be, and for me personally at least, no FP language will ever beat the productivity that I can achieve with Go, especially because at least in my problem domain the real world problems always have enough corner cases that FP wouldn't even be useful. In Go I just systematically eliminate and handle each possible step and state, in a straightforward way, directly deal with the business logic, and then it's done and it works predictably and efficiently for years. Interfaces really are a sufficient form of polymorphism, too.
MSFT_Edging 3y ago
I've always had a hard time breaking into FP paradigms. The basic tutorials feel a bit like math proofs and it's hard to connect the ideas into things I'm actually doing. As it turned out, I accidentally started learning some functional-lite paradigms in Python. I learned that I actually do like some of these paradigms, and think through them already, I just couldn't connect my internal understanding with the language of FP. I started learning Rust recently, as it's an exciting systems language with some hype. There, you see even more functional bits which is just a pleasure to use. I'm not in an area where purely functional would make sense but having the quality of life that certain paradigms brings is nice. I'm still very much a novice in FP techniques, but the ability to try aspects as I go is helpful in learning.

osclarto 3y ago

totally agree, for me golang is a strongly imperative language and that's ok. I'm willing to be proved wrong, but I would imagine if you want to do functional programming it's going to be a lot easier to just use a different language.

dingnuts 3y ago
Big time agreement here as well. I'm biased because I've built a career on Go at this point but the pragmatism and ability to just get things done in Go without faffing about with unnecessary abstractions is I think one of the strongest practical demonstrations of how incredible an imperative language can be, and for me personally at least, no FP language will ever beat the productivity that I can achieve with Go, especially because at least in my problem domain the real world problems always have enough corner cases that FP wouldn't even be useful. In Go I just systematically eliminate and handle each possible step and state, in a straightforward way, directly deal with the business logic, and then it's done and it works predictably and efficiently for years. Interfaces really are a sufficient form of polymorphism, too.

MSFT_Edging 3y ago

I've always had a hard time breaking into FP paradigms. The basic tutorials feel a bit like math proofs and it's hard to connect the ideas into things I'm actually doing. As it turned out, I accidentally started learning some functional-lite paradigms in Python. I learned that I actually do like some of these paradigms, and think through them already, I just couldn't connect my internal understanding with the language of FP. I started learning Rust recently, as it's an exciting systems language with some hype. There, you see even more functional bits which is just a pleasure to use. I'm not in an area where purely functional would make sense but having the quality of life that certain paradigms brings is nice. I'm still very much a novice in FP techniques, but the ability to try aspects as I go is helpful in learning.