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0 pointschrischen6y ago0 comments

Agreed on gentle approach. I've started using libraries like Ramda for JS, which is especially designed to ease people into functional patterns.

I then moved to FP-TS, which makes more heavy use of haskell-like patterns and monads.

The hard part isn't the syntax of whatever language, but understanding the new patterns and way of thinking, which you can do with a simulation layer like FP-TS (for typescript/javascript).

The functional patterns and emphasis on types makes your code robust and more correct. It emphasizes correctness, which is ultimately what your job is as a programmer. Optimization comes after.

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4 comments · 1 top-level

vorticalbox6y ago· 3 in thread

I too have started down the fp router with ramda and ramda-adjunct.

Though other people at my work dislike it due to them not understanding what's going on

pk_kinetic6y ago

There could be other reasons for disliking it other than not understanding what’s going on. Maybe other people are working on tight deadlines and don’t have the time or mental energy trying to understand an entirely unfamiliar programming paradigm.

I would want to program in functional too, but I would seek out projects or teams that already use functional. I’d never introduce a functional language to an already established team or project, unless of course, I was the CTO and there were clear benefits.

chrischenOP6y ago

If you practice domain driven design, you can always start out isolated projects or even just new modules if your code is sufficiently modularized. I started out by making a new library/module with Ramda, and then it's consumed via a function call that anyone programming in any style can use.

Agreed that functional patterns can be hard to understand if you don't know the patterns, but if you do know them they are much easier to understand and reason about the code. It's a long term investment, and one that frankly I believe will be inevitable as more and more people start doing programming work.

Fellshard6y ago

Had the same result, and had to settle for the middle ground of (lodash | underscore; I don't recall which now.)

There's a lot of resistance to adopting anything with the name functional, and that resistance is often seen in a /refusal/ to try to understand instead of a mere lack of understanding: people put up walls straightaway. I expect many need motivating examples to guide them to it.

Languages like Kotlin are pointing the way towards that middle ground far more effectively than, say, Scala did.

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