4 ms·

> Unfortunately many people are chasing the Holy Grail of "functional programming" and never finding it because "functional programming" is a pale shadow of wha

by vore 3y ago

> Unfortunately many people are chasing the Holy Grail of "functional programming" and never finding it because "functional programming" is a pale shadow of what's possible when you understand how compilers work: this is how Common LISP and scheme are so much more profound then, say, Haskell Huh? What does this even mean? Both languages are very different from each other and the only thing they really have in common is having functions — how is one more “profound” than the other or any less worthy of being “functional programming”, for whatever that means to you?

intelVISA 3y ago
I've never seen good code, but if it exists I am sure it'd be a lisp.
PaulHoule 3y ago
I've met a few young programmers who heard somewhere that object-oriented programming was bad and they want to get the enlightenment of functional programming that they've heard about. Frequently they travel from job to job like itinerant martial artists always looking for somewhere where they practice the true technique but they always seem disappointed as it is just as easy if not easier to screw up handling errors with monads than it is with exceptions and they find analogies like "a monad is like a burrito" just get them more confused. As for something profound I'd point you to https://github.com/cerner/clara-rules https://github.com/cerner/clara-rules which many people will struggle with because like many other production rules engines in LISP (and many other examples of simple compilers), there is hardly any code! Contrast that to the orders of magnitude larger rules engine Drools https://github.com/kiegroup/drools https://github.com/kiegroup/drools which is so crazy-complicated primarily because the Drools language is Java-based so you need all sorts of things that Clara or CLIPS don't need. Note that both of these systems use variations of this algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_algorithm where a set of rules can be compiled to a network of transitions that can happen when facts are added to the knowledge base so it is very much an example of compiler technology. (That said, Drools supports a lot of features that Clara doesn't and also supports a very advanced RETE-like algorithm that can exploit parallelism that early versions couldn't.)
- eternityforest 3y ago
  What are these iternant code students trying to achieve with all this? Performance? Productivity? Lower defects? Safety critical code seems to still be usually in C/C++, for reasons having nothing to do with the language being safe. Why are these people not studying Erlang, MISRA C, Rust, some kind of formal proof solver language, or OpenCL? What do people aspire to one day work on that would make the Haskell or LISP more appealing than a more locked down, static checking, kind of language? Programming culture is more confusing than the code itself!
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    At risk of sounding like Peter Thiel I think a lot of this thinking is driven my mimesis rather than thinking. That is, there is a lot of talk about how functional >> OO and "OO sux" and all that. I think most of these people hadn't worked in the industry enough to have a clear picture of what better productivity and lower defects would look like but instead they were looking for a movement to join.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Mastery, perhaps. They see some sort of role model and figure the tools they use are a roadmap to becoming a distinguished engineer themselves. If only it was that easy. It is interesting how functional programming has to consider data organization completely differently, but sometimes it is just that, a tool or methodology, not a philosophy to subscribe to. Ideally, the good (or future good) engineers realize this and try to understand the less talked about soft skills needed to succeed.
    - eternityforest 3y ago
      I guess that's probably a lot of why I don't get it, I never had any programmer role models. I looked up to Adam and Jamie, and I never saw them doing serious code.
      - n6h6 3y ago

by vore 3y ago

intelVISA 3y ago

I've never seen good code, but if it exists I am sure it'd be a lisp.

PaulHoule 3y ago

I've met a few young programmers who heard somewhere that object-oriented programming was bad and they want to get the enlightenment of functional programming that they've heard about. Frequently they travel from job to job like itinerant martial artists always looking for somewhere where they practice the true technique but they always seem disappointed as it is just as easy if not easier to screw up handling errors with monads than it is with exceptions and they find analogies like "a monad is like a burrito" just get them more confused. As for something profound I'd point you to https://github.com/cerner/clara-rules https://github.com/cerner/clara-rules which many people will struggle with because like many other production rules engines in LISP (and many other examples of simple compilers), there is hardly any code! Contrast that to the orders of magnitude larger rules engine Drools https://github.com/kiegroup/drools https://github.com/kiegroup/drools which is so crazy-complicated primarily because the Drools language is Java-based so you need all sorts of things that Clara or CLIPS don't need. Note that both of these systems use variations of this algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_algorithm where a set of rules can be compiled to a network of transitions that can happen when facts are added to the knowledge base so it is very much an example of compiler technology. (That said, Drools supports a lot of features that Clara doesn't and also supports a very advanced RETE-like algorithm that can exploit parallelism that early versions couldn't.)

eternityforest 3y ago
What are these iternant code students trying to achieve with all this? Performance? Productivity? Lower defects? Safety critical code seems to still be usually in C/C++, for reasons having nothing to do with the language being safe. Why are these people not studying Erlang, MISRA C, Rust, some kind of formal proof solver language, or OpenCL? What do people aspire to one day work on that would make the Haskell or LISP more appealing than a more locked down, static checking, kind of language? Programming culture is more confusing than the code itself!
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  At risk of sounding like Peter Thiel I think a lot of this thinking is driven my mimesis rather than thinking. That is, there is a lot of talk about how functional >> OO and "OO sux" and all that. I think most of these people hadn't worked in the industry enough to have a clear picture of what better productivity and lower defects would look like but instead they were looking for a movement to join.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Mastery, perhaps. They see some sort of role model and figure the tools they use are a roadmap to becoming a distinguished engineer themselves. If only it was that easy. It is interesting how functional programming has to consider data organization completely differently, but sometimes it is just that, a tool or methodology, not a philosophy to subscribe to. Ideally, the good (or future good) engineers realize this and try to understand the less talked about soft skills needed to succeed.
  - eternityforest 3y ago
    I guess that's probably a lot of why I don't get it, I never had any programmer role models. I looked up to Adam and Jamie, and I never saw them doing serious code.
    - n6h6 3y ago