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Would you say that the functional paradigm has started to gain more traction lately though? -- I don't know because I haven't been programming long enough, so m

Would you say that the functional paradigm has started to gain more traction lately though? -- I don't know because I haven't been programming long enough, so maybe it just seems that way to me simply because now that I'm aware of its existence I'm seeing it everywhere. I read a quote once about The Velvet Underground that stuck with me. It said that, while not many people bought their albums, everyone who did started a band. Sometimes it seems like Haskell is The Velvet Underground of programming languages. While not many people are using it, everyone who is has started their own language/functional library -- Influencing other languages is, in a way, people using FP languages, just indirectly. I've not written a single serious Haskell program -- I don't think I would even know how to, tbh --, but I sure feel like just playing with it and learning about its theoretical motivations has made me a much better programmer in other languages.

mhogomchungu 12y ago
>Would you say that the functional paradigm has started to gain more traction lately though? That is certainly true but I think more people will not shift to functional programming languages to do functional programming style programming but will stick with their favorite imperative language and do functional programming there as more and more imperative languages add features and facilities that allow functional programming style programming. Case in point, i have this Qt/C++[1] library that evaluates lambdas in a lazy fashion. You can have,for example, a function that returns what is called "a future",ie something that can be evaluated at a later time to produce a value "held" in the future or the future can be cancelled if the function caller decides they no longer need the result. Introductions of lambdas in C++11 allows for this kind of programming to happen in C++ and i suspect more and more C++ programmers will start coding to this style as more and more APIs will start getting released that will take lambdas as arguments or return them as results. It is an interesting new way of doing C++ and these ideas are mostly borrowed from functional programming world. [1] https://github.com/mhogomchungu/tasks https://github.com/mhogomchungu/tasks
dllthomas 12y ago
"It said that, while not many people bought their albums, everyone who did started a band." And possibly a country. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A1clav_Havel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A1clav_Havel
pjmlp 12y ago
> Would you say that the functional paradigm has started to gain more traction lately though? Surely. All major languages are going hybrid, mixing imperative (mostly OOP) with functional programming concepts. Until we get a complete new computer architecture, like quantum computers, the mainstream will be hybrid OOP + FP.
pedrow 12y ago
> Would you say that the functional paradigm has started to gain more traction lately though? I would and I believe it started to happen when people started talking about Scala. I also think something similar happened with OOP in (maybe?) the early 1990s - i.e. we'd had Simula, Smalltalk and so on for years but it became mainstream. I'm thinking of things like Visual Basic 1.0 (1991), C++ v2.0 (1989)

mhogomchungu 12y ago

>Would you say that the functional paradigm has started to gain more traction lately though? That is certainly true but I think more people will not shift to functional programming languages to do functional programming style programming but will stick with their favorite imperative language and do functional programming there as more and more imperative languages add features and facilities that allow functional programming style programming. Case in point, i have this Qt/C++[1] library that evaluates lambdas in a lazy fashion. You can have,for example, a function that returns what is called "a future",ie something that can be evaluated at a later time to produce a value "held" in the future or the future can be cancelled if the function caller decides they no longer need the result. Introductions of lambdas in C++11 allows for this kind of programming to happen in C++ and i suspect more and more C++ programmers will start coding to this style as more and more APIs will start getting released that will take lambdas as arguments or return them as results. It is an interesting new way of doing C++ and these ideas are mostly borrowed from functional programming world. [1] https://github.com/mhogomchungu/tasks https://github.com/mhogomchungu/tasks

dllthomas 12y ago

"It said that, while not many people bought their albums, everyone who did started a band." And possibly a country. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A1clav_Havel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A1clav_Havel

pjmlp 12y ago

> Would you say that the functional paradigm has started to gain more traction lately though? Surely. All major languages are going hybrid, mixing imperative (mostly OOP) with functional programming concepts. Until we get a complete new computer architecture, like quantum computers, the mainstream will be hybrid OOP + FP.

pedrow 12y ago

> Would you say that the functional paradigm has started to gain more traction lately though? I would and I believe it started to happen when people started talking about Scala. I also think something similar happened with OOP in (maybe?) the early 1990s - i.e. we'd had Simula, Smalltalk and so on for years but it became mainstream. I'm thinking of things like Visual Basic 1.0 (1991), C++ v2.0 (1989)