> This is a big step down from "All programmers should know and implement purity by default because mutability is the next goto."
Not something I said. I explicitly mentioned the functional core, iterative shell architecture, and explained how you need to understand functional enough to know when it's a good time to not use it.
At this point your posts look like someone making fun of a complex technology they do not understand, without really approaching any valid criticism of its real shortcomings, because such criticism require a thorough understanding of the thing being criticised.
> Functional programming that introduces or models state requires more abstraction, and then complexity.
I'm pretty sure I've said exactly that. Good thing we agree on it. But you don't seem to realize that this fact is only true for handling state, and not for other aspects of programming.
> Imperative programming with state is as simple as functional programming without state.
You've never tried to compose multiple asynchronous event streams of complex data types from different subsystems into one single user-facing unified presentation, have you? Your assertion is simply not true. Such feat is way simpler in functional reactive style, and a true nightmare in an imperative multithreaded program. That's why web frameworks are evolving to handle more and more reactive functional patterns for compositional asynchronous tasks.
Your comparison of mutable programming to the use of goto and unhygenic macros would suggest that mutation is a similar type of dinosaur to be culled.
>You've never tried to compose multiple asynchronous event streams of complex data types from different subsystems into one single user-facing unified presentation, have you? Your assertion is simply not true. Such feat is way simpler in functional reactive style, and a true nightmare in an imperative multithreaded program. That's why web frameworks are evolving to handle more and more reactive functional patterns for compositional asynchronous tasks.
Imperative programming with state is simple. Programming asychronous event streams of complex data types from different subsystems into a single unified presentation is complex. Functional programming claims to have abstractions that make the latter more simple than imperative programming, which may or may not be true.
The use of functional reactive style in React (I do not believe Angular relies on this) is probably driven by JavaScript having atrocious scoping rules and the general Web / DOM stack being full of hacks and badly written APIs. The hacks that are still present in React make it seem like this will just be yet another layer of cruft that is the front end, alas.
> Your comparison of mutable programming to the use of goto and unhygenic macros would suggest that mutation is a similar type of dinosaur to be culled.
Then you missed the point, which is that using mutation a.k.a. cells a.k.a. imperative code when it's not needed is a dinosaur to be culled. But you need to understand when it's not needed to realize this.
Functional reactive programming adoption is not something caused by the state of one particular stack; as it is also being adopted by game engines, big data analysis tools, development environments like web notebooks, etc. People throughout the industry are seeing the value and are simplifying their tools thanks to the paradigm.
> Functional programming claims to have abstractions that make the latter more simple than imperative programming, which may or may not be true.
Look, I get it, I really do. You don't see the possibilities of the functional paradigm and don't know how and where to use it effectively, so you keep criticizing the small part of it you do understand. I've been there, done that (though it was a long time ago).
With that attitude you can stay comfortably in a corner and be impervious to the changes the industry is undergoing, and miss out on a really cool programming style out of prejudice. Or you can accept the intellectual challenge (which it certainly is, especially for someone who has spent his entire career with a single style), and know concepts that those who learn them agree that they improve their programming even if they do not adopt them 100% for their work.
It's up to you. I don't gain anything with this, so I will not try to convince you of it.
>> Functional programming that introduces or models state requires more abstraction, and then complexity.
> I'm pretty sure I've said exactly that. Good thing we agree on it.
I strongly disagree with the complexity part of this statement. Yes, FP is in many ways "more abstract", but so is natural human thought. More abstraction is not the same as more complexity (except when the abstractions are inappropriate in a given situation), does not lead to more complexity, and the FP approach to state is objectively simpler in most* real-life scenarios.
I don't believe in zero cost abstractions. All abstractions have a cost of being understood and implemented. x = x + 1 is simpler than world = worldupdate(world(increment(x)).
Abstractions exist in our brains. They are costly when they are unfamiliar (requiring learning) or when they are inappropriate (the product of incompetence and causing pain for everyone). Sometimes they are exactly as costly as they should be, reflecting the inherent and essential complexity of the problem, which is ideal. Inappropriate can mean either “too little” or “not enough”… but more accurately, it just means “the wrong abstraction”. Making everything a class, or treating everything like a Turing tape, is also creating mountains of almost-certainly inappropriate abstractions, in most (but not all) cases.
This is very handwavy, because i’m speaking in very general terms. But for a single, narrow, non-general, concrete example, just look at the ORM impedence mismatch problem with OOP languages. AFAIK, after 40-some years it’s still unsolved. I don’t believe FP suffers from this specific problem (again, just to give a concrete and non-handwavy example), because FP is very analogous to relational programming (functions are a special case of relations).
This shouldn’t be so controversial and should be very intuitive to anyone who spends a bit of time thinking about it. A function is fundamentally a simpler building block than a class. It’s more atomic.
I don't believe an ORM is a zero cost abstraction either. Or most of OOP.
The cost of implementing everything as a function is when one has to contend with the fundamental machine architecture not dealing with everything as a function. This often leads to one of the highest cost abstractions out there, the Monad.
y = x + 1 is not dealing with state. Supposing there was a desire to have x = x + 1, the simple way of doing this is x = x + 1, and the complicated way is to do world = Increment(x, world).
Not something I said. I explicitly mentioned the functional core, iterative shell architecture, and explained how you need to understand functional enough to know when it's a good time to not use it.
At this point your posts look like someone making fun of a complex technology they do not understand, without really approaching any valid criticism of its real shortcomings, because such criticism require a thorough understanding of the thing being criticised.
> Functional programming that introduces or models state requires more abstraction, and then complexity.
I'm pretty sure I've said exactly that. Good thing we agree on it. But you don't seem to realize that this fact is only true for handling state, and not for other aspects of programming.
> Imperative programming with state is as simple as functional programming without state.
You've never tried to compose multiple asynchronous event streams of complex data types from different subsystems into one single user-facing unified presentation, have you? Your assertion is simply not true. Such feat is way simpler in functional reactive style, and a true nightmare in an imperative multithreaded program. That's why web frameworks are evolving to handle more and more reactive functional patterns for compositional asynchronous tasks.