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A Bit of Heresy: Functional Languages are Overrated

49 points by kyleburton 16y ago

kyleburton 16y ago
I don't think FP is all about concurrency - it's about more than that. In my experience it reduces the possible bugs in code (type inference / checking, referential transparency) - these aspects make concurrency easier to achieve, but that's not all there is to FP.
- nirav 16y ago
  Unfortunately though, FP is being sold as panacea of concurrency problems, at least in Java world. I think that FP is much more than that, it actually helps me solve problems in a very different and elegant way. I don't know how you classify this benefit but for me it was analogous to solving a problem with recursion or loop; while both can solve problems, recursion seems to be much more intuitive and elegant way - Same for FP vs Imperative approaches.
  - shasta 16y ago
    I think it's more that shared mutable everything can't possibly scale in parallel, rather than that FP is a panacea.
  - vamsee 16y ago
    I'd agree to that, and solving problems in FP always made me think harder to get an elegant solution. Though, it also means that you're uncomfortably close to math. I think to fully exploit/understand FP, the programmer also needs to be good at understanding the mathematical models/formulas behind FP. Otherwise, I think he cannot truly exploit the potential of the tools he's using. I haven't spent a lot of time doing FP to justify that opinion fully, but whatever FP I did made me wish I took my math classes more seriously.
pavelludiq 16y ago
Im all for heresy, even though i don't agree with the author, his heresy is useful, we must avoid programming religions. It at least helped me understand a cultural problem programmers have at the moment with FP. The downfall of OOP was that it was misunderstood by all the imperative programmers. Even though it was adopted, it was misused. The downfall of FP will be that it is misunderstood by all the oo programmers, if it gets adopted it will get misused. I never found FP hard to learn or use. I know now that it was because when i got introduced to it, i only had about a year of imperative programming experience and no OO experience at all. I was a rather fresh mind. My advice to all OO programmers willing to learn FP is to approach it with a fresh mind, it may save you a lot of headaches. Imagine you know nothing about programming, you may be surprised how close to the truth that is for some of us(including me).
jerf 16y ago
The error here is confusing the language for the paradigm. He all but concedes that functional programming is a good idea and you can do it in current languages. True. When you do that, you have a functional program. The "functionalness" or "objectness" or "logicness" of a program is a characteristic of a program, not the implementation language. When you do object-oriented C, it isn't a "hack", it really is object-oriented C. You just don't have language support, you're doing objects by hand, with the corresponding disadvantages (syntactic pain) and advantages (no privileged concept of objects means you can do your own thing, which can be useful; want 'prototypes'? just do it! arguably easier in C than C++). When you do functional Javascript, it really is functional programming, you just don't have the same language support. When you refuse to mutate values and treat a language's values as immutable, even though the language permits you to mutate them, you have immutable values; the essense of immutable values is that you can depend on them not being mutated, not that the language makes it syntactically impossible to express mutation. This has obvious advantages if you want to use an immutable style, but is not strictly necessary. Proof: It all ends up running on assembler anyhow, which isn't functional or OO or logical or any other paradigm. All of those things are categories of programs, not intrinsic attributes of the environment. The author isn't being anywhere near as contrary as I think he'd like....
- cageface 16y ago
  The title of his article is that functional languages are overrated and he specifically points out that functional techniques are available in other languages, so I don't think you can say he's confusing the two concepts.
  - CodeMage 16y ago
    Yet he has a bias and it shows in his comments on Scala: And if you're working in a hybrid language, what assurances do you have, really, that your system is really thread safe? Indeed, the risk compentation effect might give you a false sense of security, giving you a system that actually had more concurrency problems that one written in a "dangerous" language. The phrase "hybrid language" in the original text is a hyperlink to Scala. By author's own admission, the languages he has tried were Erlang and Haskell. He hasn't mentioned either trying or not trying Scala, but the article seems to imply the latter. The problem with what he said is that he seems to be dismissing "hybrid" languages like Scala as equally overrated or worse than pure functional languages like Haskell. Just like Jerf pointed out, it's the paradigm that matters more than the language. A language like Scala is designed to make FP paradigm easy to do, without being a pure functional language. As far as I know, it's not designed to make your programs "thread safe". I believe that the author wouldn't have made his claim about "risk compensation" if he had actually studied Scala and tried it out.
Robin_Message 16y ago
If you think shared state is hard to scale and you are arguing for message passing, then what's wrong with Erlang? In fact, you can't conflate Erlang, Haskell, O'Caml and Scala together as FP. By being immutable by default, FP makes message passing simpler and in some cases forces you not to do shared state, so FP helps you do concurrency that way. Closures are old news and are in almost everything now anyway (I'd include Java anonymous inner classes, they just have a nasty syntax, although good for grouping methods, e.g. mouse events). Other than immutability by default and closures, what makes a language functional anyway? Because if you take the languages you suggested together, that's all I see them having in common.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  ...what's wrong with Erlang? Strings: 1> [98, 114, 111, 107, 101, 110] == "broken". true Records are not real records, just compile time labels placed on top of tuples. The syntax, seriously, three different line terminators? Python and Haskell both make great go-to languages, and you can solve a wide variety of problems in them. Erlang is the language you suffer with when you truly need massive concurrency and distribution.
  - cageface 16y ago
    Haskell seems to have too many rough edges to make it nice for real-world work. The inconsistent error handling (errors vs maybe vs either), weak record syntax, and ruthlessly strict stance on mutability don't sound like things I want to wrestle with on a large scale. Scala, on the other hand, seems to strike more reasonable compromises on these points and has all the java stuff to draw on when you need it.
    - kwantam 16y ago
      > inconsistent error handling I don't understand how offering several choices is synonymous with inconsistent. If you really really want "consistency", establish a policy for your code and stick with it. All three have distinct uses, and each is better for certain things than for others. Anyhow, there's nothing particularly special about the Maybe or Either monads; you should be able to easily implement either of those yourself, and calling them a feature of the language---beyond the fact that they happen to be in the standard library---is somewhat specious.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
"The languages are just too complex, too terse, and absolutely full of academic shitheaddery. I mean, seriously, what the hell." The author links to the formal specification of Haskell and decides pattern matching is "academic shitheaddery"? Is the formal specification of Java any better? http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/grammars.html http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/gramma...
- telemachos 16y ago
  I was thinking of HTML 4 specs: clearly a formatting language that many people can use (with a reasonable degree of correctness), but the spec is not light reading. (The specs for HTML are no doubt far more comprehensible than Haskell's, but I would expect the formal specification of any language to be more painful to read than it is to work with the language. In my experience, that's the nature of the formality involved in a spec: in an effort to be maximally precise and detailed, they become less and less readable).
- knieveltech 16y ago
  Java (being rife with academic shitheadery itself) may not have been the best choice if you're trying to suggest the author doesn't have a point.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    I picked Java because a) I know where to find it, b) the author mentions Java positively and c) the C++ standard costs $18. Any formal language spec will look ugly and hard to read. That's just the nature of formal specs.
    - sprout 16y ago
      R5RS is a pretty light read.
cageface 16y ago
In this interview: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/armstrong-peyton-jones-erlang-haskell http://www.infoq.com/interviews/armstrong-peyton-jones-erlan... Simon Peyton-Jones, the father of Haskell himself, dismisses the idea that avoiding mutable state automatically buys you easy concurrency: But it turned out to be very hard to turn that into actual wall clock speedups on processes, leaving aside all issues of robustness or that kind of stuff, because if you do that style of concurrency you get lots of very tiny fine-grained processes and you get no locality and you get very difficult scheduling problems. The overheads overwhelm the benefits, There are some useful and novel ideas in the FP languages but they're no silver bullet. Whatever the conventional solution for concurrent programming turns out to be, it will have to be exploited in languages more accessible to the median programmer than Haskell.
- loup-vaillant 16y ago
  Beware: you say "concurrent", but SPJ was talking about "parallel". Not exactly the same.
  - cageface 16y ago
    "Concurrent" is the word he uses repeatedly. What distinction do you make between "parallel" and "concurrent"?
    - loup-vaillant 16y ago
      "Concurrent" is about observable behaviour. Like with a web server, serving many many requests concurrently. When SPJ is talking about concurrency, he is most likely talking about shared state with software transactional memory. "Parallel" is about optimizing an otherwise linear, or atomic program. Like map-reduce, which can be run on a single CPU or on a distributed cluster. When SPJ is talking about parallelism he is most likely talking about nested data parallelism. The distinction between the two can be made without ambiguity with the terms "task parallelism" (concurrency), and "data parallelism" (parallelism).
      - 16y ago
jeb 16y ago
The future of programming is when both my mum and my little brother can write small code that does some particular task for them. Neither of them will ever understand functional programming. That's basically the answer to what paradigm will win.
- CodeMage 16y ago
  Do you honestly believe that? The history of programming is littered with failed attempts to do that. For example, does "Microsoft Acess" ring any bells? The future of programming is definitely not to turn users into programmers.
  - loup-vaillant 16y ago
    Oh yes it is. Users should be programmers. All of them. Just so they can write those little scripts. It's a question of independence. You probably wanted to say that the future is not to dumb down programming to the level of my "mom". I agree with that.
    - CodeMage 16y ago
      Maybe I have a weird family, but my mom does not want to write any scripts. She just wants the damn thing to work. For her and many other people I know, it's a bit like driving a car. If you want to drive a car, you have to know certain basic rules and that's it. The guys who do maintenance and repairs are the ones who know what happens under the hood and you take your car to them whenever necessary. I also know lots of people who know what happens under the hood and love to tinker with their cars. I'm not one of them myself. I do that with computers, but not with cars. I don't see why computers should be a special case where everyone has to know how to tinker with the "stuff under the hood".
      - loup-vaillant 16y ago
        First, what we want an what's good for us are two different sets of things. Especially when you don't have total information. Second, programming does not always mean tinkering stuff "under the hood". Advanced spreadsheets are front-end and programming at the same time. Even that: $ cat * | grep "groceries" | sort is a program (though a rather trivial one). "Real" programs will still be professional and hobbyist stuff. But scripting can be everyone's business. Third, computers are fundamentally different from any other device: they are general purpose. They can process any information you care to feed them, in any way you care to program them to. Finally, when our moms want to do something the computer can't presently do, but could, they have 3 alternatives: give up, acquire a program that does the job, or program it themselves. For many many jobs, acquire a program is the only viable solution. But for small, specialized tasks, the existence of a dedicated program is less likely. So if our moms want the damn thing to "just work", they have no choice but to program it. Knowing how to use computers (and the internet) is becoming as important as knowing how to read. Because computers are general purpose machines, knowing how to program them is an important part of knowing how to use them. It's a big investment, but so is reading.
dman 16y ago
I would have loved this if the blog post contained more technical details and some code snippets about the tradeoffs involved. Functional languages cover a broad spectrum. There are often multiple concepts being explored in a language, then there is the issue of cultural heritage of the respective communities, and the fact that FP languages have traditionally had multiple implementations with different tradeoffs. as an example -> lisp and scheme are functional without being immutable. scheme favors a small spec while lisp includes large number of inbuilt primitives. Clojure introduces persistent datastructures and interesting new concepts like agents and integration with the jvm. I know too little about haskell and ML to make any informed comments about them but they appear espouse static typing unlike lisp / scheme. So if you have a particular beef about a functional language, look further and you will find one that doesnt share those traits.
Zak 16y ago
I'll speak to the languages I know here. Haskell is a research language. It has become usable for practical purposes, but at heart its still a research language. Haskell focuses on isolating side effects over practicality or ease of use. For certain classes of problems, that turns out to be the most practical thing. Want to be sure certain parts of your program don't access /dev/nuclear_missiles? Haskell is your language. Is your app mainly centered around a complex GUI? Maybe you should look elsewhere. I notice no mentions of Clojure in the article aside from including it in a list of functional languages. Clojure is a practical language designed for getting stuff done. It offers the most comprehensive solution for managing shared state I've seen in any language and does its best to get out of your way.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  "Want to be sure certain parts of your program don't access /dev/nuclear_missiles?" Actually, if you want to make sure that parts of your program don't access /dev/nuclear_missiles, I think that E is your language. In Haskell, it's as easy as `unsafePerformIO $ hGetContents "/dev/nuclear_missiles"`, which at least warns you that it's unsafe but doesn't really give any assurances otherwise. And if you're in the IO monad anyway, you don't even need the unsafePerformIO.
devonrt 16y ago
A really incoherent article that's wrong in a lot of ways. The title is misleading because the author's main beef is with the idea that functional languages are the "solution" to the concurrency "problem." He admits that he's tried to learn both Erlang and Haskell and given up because the languages are too hard, too complex and "absolutely full of academic shitheaddery" and points to the reference manuals of Haskell and OCaml as proof (edit to add: Erlang is the opposite of "academic shitheaddery". Totally born and bred for business!). I might come off as an asshole for saying this, but if attempting to learn and then giving up on Erlang and Haskell is your only experience with functional languages then you're not in a position to comment on it. Keep digging into Haskell until you run into a Monad Transformer stack a mile long or spend some time with Clojure. The author then conflates Actor based concurrency with functional programming in general. Let me lay my bias on the table right now: I'm sick to death of hearing about Actors. Erlang put them on the map and I think Scala made them popular, but Scala missed the point. Erlang's actors are only one piece of its distributed-ness; there's a lot more to Erlang that lets it scale as well as it does: a VM tuned for a large number of green threads, a transparent network stack, the supervisor model etc. Scala has none of these. Not only that, but actors themselves only solve one tiny problem in the world of concurrent (really, for actors, distributed) computing. They do nothing to address shared state. Finally, neither of these languages is really, truly functional. If the author has titled the post "Actors are Overrated" I might have agreed with it.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  I think a more accurate title may've been "Things I don't understand are overrated."
- Scriptor 16y ago
  Completely agree. The author mentions that he tried to learn Erlang and Haskell (we don't know how much he tried), uses the technical specs of Haskell and O'Caml, and then makes a side swat at Scala. It looks like at the beginning of this year he had decided to learn Haskell as a way to explore functional programming: http://www.benrady.com/2010/01/language-of-the-year-2010.html http://www.benrady.com/2010/01/language-of-the-year-2010.htm.... I simply don't think being unable to learn a language qualifies you to bash it. It'd be more fitting for him to post about the first point in whatever Haskell resource he is using where he became confused.
jcromartie 16y ago
> I think the downfall of some of these languages is that they get wrapped up in being "functional" rather than focusing on solving a particular class of problem. They abandon convention and common sense for complex type systems and functional purity. He's obviously not really looked at Clojure, then. The design philosophy of Clojure can be summarized as "functional programming is great; people also need to get stuff done."
dusklight 16y ago
Why is our time being wasted with this article. The author himself says that he is too dumb to understand functional languages. He knows so little that he keeps carping on about concurrency, when that is nowhere near any of the central reasons why functional is valuable. Better support for concurrency is an accident, a side-effect. What makes functional important is the ability to create living abstractions, and understanding how functional allows you to do that and why it is important makes you a better programmer in any language. There is no heresy here, only ignorance. The author is basically saying functional languages are "overrated" because he is unable to understand them. There are definitely valid arguments to be made against the functional paradigm, but he has made none of them.
dkarl 16y ago
The languages are just too complex, too terse, and absolutely full of academic shitheaddery. I mean, seriously, what the hell. (Where "seriously" and "hell" are links to the Haskell and O'Caml language documentation.) God oh god I wish every language I used could be specified as precisely as the Haskell example. I didn't bother figuring out what the notation meant, but if I used Haskell, I could afford the time to understand it. Seriously, Perl and C++ have equivalent complexities; you just aren't expected to understand them. Experienced programmers steer clear of unfamiliar constructs, which works well enough, but it would be so much nicer to actually understand stuff.

49 points by kyleburton 16y ago

I don't think FP is all about concurrency - it's about more than that. In my experience it reduces the possible bugs in code (type inference / checking, referential transparency) - these aspects make concurrency easier to achieve, but that's not all there is to FP.

nirav 16y ago
Unfortunately though, FP is being sold as panacea of concurrency problems, at least in Java world. I think that FP is much more than that, it actually helps me solve problems in a very different and elegant way. I don't know how you classify this benefit but for me it was analogous to solving a problem with recursion or loop; while both can solve problems, recursion seems to be much more intuitive and elegant way - Same for FP vs Imperative approaches.
- shasta 16y ago
  I think it's more that shared mutable everything can't possibly scale in parallel, rather than that FP is a panacea.
- vamsee 16y ago
  I'd agree to that, and solving problems in FP always made me think harder to get an elegant solution. Though, it also means that you're uncomfortably close to math. I think to fully exploit/understand FP, the programmer also needs to be good at understanding the mathematical models/formulas behind FP. Otherwise, I think he cannot truly exploit the potential of the tools he's using. I haven't spent a lot of time doing FP to justify that opinion fully, but whatever FP I did made me wish I took my math classes more seriously.

pavelludiq 16y ago

Im all for heresy, even though i don't agree with the author, his heresy is useful, we must avoid programming religions. It at least helped me understand a cultural problem programmers have at the moment with FP. The downfall of OOP was that it was misunderstood by all the imperative programmers. Even though it was adopted, it was misused. The downfall of FP will be that it is misunderstood by all the oo programmers, if it gets adopted it will get misused. I never found FP hard to learn or use. I know now that it was because when i got introduced to it, i only had about a year of imperative programming experience and no OO experience at all. I was a rather fresh mind. My advice to all OO programmers willing to learn FP is to approach it with a fresh mind, it may save you a lot of headaches. Imagine you know nothing about programming, you may be surprised how close to the truth that is for some of us(including me).

jerf 16y ago

The error here is confusing the language for the paradigm. He all but concedes that functional programming is a good idea and you can do it in current languages. True. When you do that, you have a functional program. The "functionalness" or "objectness" or "logicness" of a program is a characteristic of a program, not the implementation language. When you do object-oriented C, it isn't a "hack", it really is object-oriented C. You just don't have language support, you're doing objects by hand, with the corresponding disadvantages (syntactic pain) and advantages (no privileged concept of objects means you can do your own thing, which can be useful; want 'prototypes'? just do it! arguably easier in C than C++). When you do functional Javascript, it really is functional programming, you just don't have the same language support. When you refuse to mutate values and treat a language's values as immutable, even though the language permits you to mutate them, you have immutable values; the essense of immutable values is that you can depend on them not being mutated, not that the language makes it syntactically impossible to express mutation. This has obvious advantages if you want to use an immutable style, but is not strictly necessary. Proof: It all ends up running on assembler anyhow, which isn't functional or OO or logical or any other paradigm. All of those things are categories of programs, not intrinsic attributes of the environment. The author isn't being anywhere near as contrary as I think he'd like....

cageface 16y ago
The title of his article is that functional languages are overrated and he specifically points out that functional techniques are available in other languages, so I don't think you can say he's confusing the two concepts.
- CodeMage 16y ago
  Yet he has a bias and it shows in his comments on Scala: And if you're working in a hybrid language, what assurances do you have, really, that your system is really thread safe? Indeed, the risk compentation effect might give you a false sense of security, giving you a system that actually had more concurrency problems that one written in a "dangerous" language. The phrase "hybrid language" in the original text is a hyperlink to Scala. By author's own admission, the languages he has tried were Erlang and Haskell. He hasn't mentioned either trying or not trying Scala, but the article seems to imply the latter. The problem with what he said is that he seems to be dismissing "hybrid" languages like Scala as equally overrated or worse than pure functional languages like Haskell. Just like Jerf pointed out, it's the paradigm that matters more than the language. A language like Scala is designed to make FP paradigm easy to do, without being a pure functional language. As far as I know, it's not designed to make your programs "thread safe". I believe that the author wouldn't have made his claim about "risk compensation" if he had actually studied Scala and tried it out.

Robin_Message 16y ago

If you think shared state is hard to scale and you are arguing for message passing, then what's wrong with Erlang? In fact, you can't conflate Erlang, Haskell, O'Caml and Scala together as FP. By being immutable by default, FP makes message passing simpler and in some cases forces you not to do shared state, so FP helps you do concurrency that way. Closures are old news and are in almost everything now anyway (I'd include Java anonymous inner classes, they just have a nasty syntax, although good for grouping methods, e.g. mouse events). Other than immutability by default and closures, what makes a language functional anyway? Because if you take the languages you suggested together, that's all I see them having in common.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
...what's wrong with Erlang? Strings: 1> [98, 114, 111, 107, 101, 110] == "broken". true Records are not real records, just compile time labels placed on top of tuples. The syntax, seriously, three different line terminators? Python and Haskell both make great go-to languages, and you can solve a wide variety of problems in them. Erlang is the language you suffer with when you truly need massive concurrency and distribution.
- cageface 16y ago
  Haskell seems to have too many rough edges to make it nice for real-world work. The inconsistent error handling (errors vs maybe vs either), weak record syntax, and ruthlessly strict stance on mutability don't sound like things I want to wrestle with on a large scale. Scala, on the other hand, seems to strike more reasonable compromises on these points and has all the java stuff to draw on when you need it.
  - kwantam 16y ago
    > inconsistent error handling I don't understand how offering several choices is synonymous with inconsistent. If you really really want "consistency", establish a policy for your code and stick with it. All three have distinct uses, and each is better for certain things than for others. Anyhow, there's nothing particularly special about the Maybe or Either monads; you should be able to easily implement either of those yourself, and calling them a feature of the language---beyond the fact that they happen to be in the standard library---is somewhat specious.

yummyfajitas 16y ago

"The languages are just too complex, too terse, and absolutely full of academic shitheaddery. I mean, seriously, what the hell." The author links to the formal specification of Haskell and decides pattern matching is "academic shitheaddery"? Is the formal specification of Java any better? http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/grammars.html http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/gramma...

telemachos 16y ago
I was thinking of HTML 4 specs: clearly a formatting language that many people can use (with a reasonable degree of correctness), but the spec is not light reading. (The specs for HTML are no doubt far more comprehensible than Haskell's, but I would expect the formal specification of any language to be more painful to read than it is to work with the language. In my experience, that's the nature of the formality involved in a spec: in an effort to be maximally precise and detailed, they become less and less readable).
knieveltech 16y ago
Java (being rife with academic shitheadery itself) may not have been the best choice if you're trying to suggest the author doesn't have a point.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  I picked Java because a) I know where to find it, b) the author mentions Java positively and c) the C++ standard costs $18. Any formal language spec will look ugly and hard to read. That's just the nature of formal specs.
  - sprout 16y ago
    R5RS is a pretty light read.

cageface 16y ago

In this interview: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/armstrong-peyton-jones-erlang-haskell http://www.infoq.com/interviews/armstrong-peyton-jones-erlan... Simon Peyton-Jones, the father of Haskell himself, dismisses the idea that avoiding mutable state automatically buys you easy concurrency: But it turned out to be very hard to turn that into actual wall clock speedups on processes, leaving aside all issues of robustness or that kind of stuff, because if you do that style of concurrency you get lots of very tiny fine-grained processes and you get no locality and you get very difficult scheduling problems. The overheads overwhelm the benefits, There are some useful and novel ideas in the FP languages but they're no silver bullet. Whatever the conventional solution for concurrent programming turns out to be, it will have to be exploited in languages more accessible to the median programmer than Haskell.

loup-vaillant 16y ago
Beware: you say "concurrent", but SPJ was talking about "parallel". Not exactly the same.
- cageface 16y ago
  "Concurrent" is the word he uses repeatedly. What distinction do you make between "parallel" and "concurrent"?
  - loup-vaillant 16y ago
    "Concurrent" is about observable behaviour. Like with a web server, serving many many requests concurrently. When SPJ is talking about concurrency, he is most likely talking about shared state with software transactional memory. "Parallel" is about optimizing an otherwise linear, or atomic program. Like map-reduce, which can be run on a single CPU or on a distributed cluster. When SPJ is talking about parallelism he is most likely talking about nested data parallelism. The distinction between the two can be made without ambiguity with the terms "task parallelism" (concurrency), and "data parallelism" (parallelism).
    - 16y ago

jeb 16y ago

The future of programming is when both my mum and my little brother can write small code that does some particular task for them. Neither of them will ever understand functional programming. That's basically the answer to what paradigm will win.

CodeMage 16y ago
Do you honestly believe that? The history of programming is littered with failed attempts to do that. For example, does "Microsoft Acess" ring any bells? The future of programming is definitely not to turn users into programmers.
- loup-vaillant 16y ago
  Oh yes it is. Users should be programmers. All of them. Just so they can write those little scripts. It's a question of independence. You probably wanted to say that the future is not to dumb down programming to the level of my "mom". I agree with that.
  - CodeMage 16y ago
    Maybe I have a weird family, but my mom does not want to write any scripts. She just wants the damn thing to work. For her and many other people I know, it's a bit like driving a car. If you want to drive a car, you have to know certain basic rules and that's it. The guys who do maintenance and repairs are the ones who know what happens under the hood and you take your car to them whenever necessary. I also know lots of people who know what happens under the hood and love to tinker with their cars. I'm not one of them myself. I do that with computers, but not with cars. I don't see why computers should be a special case where everyone has to know how to tinker with the "stuff under the hood".
    - loup-vaillant 16y ago
      First, what we want an what's good for us are two different sets of things. Especially when you don't have total information. Second, programming does not always mean tinkering stuff "under the hood". Advanced spreadsheets are front-end and programming at the same time. Even that: $ cat * | grep "groceries" | sort is a program (though a rather trivial one). "Real" programs will still be professional and hobbyist stuff. But scripting can be everyone's business. Third, computers are fundamentally different from any other device: they are general purpose. They can process any information you care to feed them, in any way you care to program them to. Finally, when our moms want to do something the computer can't presently do, but could, they have 3 alternatives: give up, acquire a program that does the job, or program it themselves. For many many jobs, acquire a program is the only viable solution. But for small, specialized tasks, the existence of a dedicated program is less likely. So if our moms want the damn thing to "just work", they have no choice but to program it. Knowing how to use computers (and the internet) is becoming as important as knowing how to read. Because computers are general purpose machines, knowing how to program them is an important part of knowing how to use them. It's a big investment, but so is reading.

dman 16y ago

I would have loved this if the blog post contained more technical details and some code snippets about the tradeoffs involved. Functional languages cover a broad spectrum. There are often multiple concepts being explored in a language, then there is the issue of cultural heritage of the respective communities, and the fact that FP languages have traditionally had multiple implementations with different tradeoffs. as an example -> lisp and scheme are functional without being immutable. scheme favors a small spec while lisp includes large number of inbuilt primitives. Clojure introduces persistent datastructures and interesting new concepts like agents and integration with the jvm. I know too little about haskell and ML to make any informed comments about them but they appear espouse static typing unlike lisp / scheme. So if you have a particular beef about a functional language, look further and you will find one that doesnt share those traits.

Zak 16y ago

I'll speak to the languages I know here. Haskell is a research language. It has become usable for practical purposes, but at heart its still a research language. Haskell focuses on isolating side effects over practicality or ease of use. For certain classes of problems, that turns out to be the most practical thing. Want to be sure certain parts of your program don't access /dev/nuclear_missiles? Haskell is your language. Is your app mainly centered around a complex GUI? Maybe you should look elsewhere. I notice no mentions of Clojure in the article aside from including it in a list of functional languages. Clojure is a practical language designed for getting stuff done. It offers the most comprehensive solution for managing shared state I've seen in any language and does its best to get out of your way.

nostrademons 16y ago
"Want to be sure certain parts of your program don't access /dev/nuclear_missiles?" Actually, if you want to make sure that parts of your program don't access /dev/nuclear_missiles, I think that E is your language. In Haskell, it's as easy as `unsafePerformIO $ hGetContents "/dev/nuclear_missiles"`, which at least warns you that it's unsafe but doesn't really give any assurances otherwise. And if you're in the IO monad anyway, you don't even need the unsafePerformIO.

devonrt 16y ago

A really incoherent article that's wrong in a lot of ways. The title is misleading because the author's main beef is with the idea that functional languages are the "solution" to the concurrency "problem." He admits that he's tried to learn both Erlang and Haskell and given up because the languages are too hard, too complex and "absolutely full of academic shitheaddery" and points to the reference manuals of Haskell and OCaml as proof (edit to add: Erlang is the opposite of "academic shitheaddery". Totally born and bred for business!). I might come off as an asshole for saying this, but if attempting to learn and then giving up on Erlang and Haskell is your only experience with functional languages then you're not in a position to comment on it. Keep digging into Haskell until you run into a Monad Transformer stack a mile long or spend some time with Clojure. The author then conflates Actor based concurrency with functional programming in general. Let me lay my bias on the table right now: I'm sick to death of hearing about Actors. Erlang put them on the map and I think Scala made them popular, but Scala missed the point. Erlang's actors are only one piece of its distributed-ness; there's a lot more to Erlang that lets it scale as well as it does: a VM tuned for a large number of green threads, a transparent network stack, the supervisor model etc. Scala has none of these. Not only that, but actors themselves only solve one tiny problem in the world of concurrent (really, for actors, distributed) computing. They do nothing to address shared state. Finally, neither of these languages is really, truly functional. If the author has titled the post "Actors are Overrated" I might have agreed with it.

nostrademons 16y ago
I think a more accurate title may've been "Things I don't understand are overrated."
Scriptor 16y ago
Completely agree. The author mentions that he tried to learn Erlang and Haskell (we don't know how much he tried), uses the technical specs of Haskell and O'Caml, and then makes a side swat at Scala. It looks like at the beginning of this year he had decided to learn Haskell as a way to explore functional programming: http://www.benrady.com/2010/01/language-of-the-year-2010.html http://www.benrady.com/2010/01/language-of-the-year-2010.htm.... I simply don't think being unable to learn a language qualifies you to bash it. It'd be more fitting for him to post about the first point in whatever Haskell resource he is using where he became confused.

jcromartie 16y ago

> I think the downfall of some of these languages is that they get wrapped up in being "functional" rather than focusing on solving a particular class of problem. They abandon convention and common sense for complex type systems and functional purity. He's obviously not really looked at Clojure, then. The design philosophy of Clojure can be summarized as "functional programming is great; people also need to get stuff done."

dusklight 16y ago

Why is our time being wasted with this article. The author himself says that he is too dumb to understand functional languages. He knows so little that he keeps carping on about concurrency, when that is nowhere near any of the central reasons why functional is valuable. Better support for concurrency is an accident, a side-effect. What makes functional important is the ability to create living abstractions, and understanding how functional allows you to do that and why it is important makes you a better programmer in any language. There is no heresy here, only ignorance. The author is basically saying functional languages are "overrated" because he is unable to understand them. There are definitely valid arguments to be made against the functional paradigm, but he has made none of them.

dkarl 16y ago

The languages are just too complex, too terse, and absolutely full of academic shitheaddery. I mean, seriously, what the hell. (Where "seriously" and "hell" are links to the Haskell and O'Caml language documentation.) God oh god I wish every language I used could be specified as precisely as the Haskell example. I didn't bother figuring out what the notation meant, but if I used Haskell, I could afford the time to understand it. Seriously, Perl and C++ have equivalent complexities; you just aren't expected to understand them. Experienced programmers steer clear of unfamiliar constructs, which works well enough, but it would be so much nicer to actually understand stuff.