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0 pointsa_wild_dandan3y ago0 comments

To be charitable to kstenerud, FP advocacy does often sound like proselytizing. When promoting FP to folks, I think we can mitigate that issue by communicating a couple points:

1. There's no dichotomy between FP and OOP. Sprinkle it into places where it makes sense to you. Adoption can come by degrees.

2. Just thinking in composable, pure functions on projects buys you serious mileage. You don't have to wrangle monads (or worse, victimize team members with advanced FP ideas). Just KISS.

FP often feels to non-practitioners like a pretentious and byzantine fad. We'll have better luck with widespread adoption if we can be inviting and dispel those negative associations. We'll seem less zealous if we can frame FP as a practice to dip one's toes into, rather than a religion to be submerged & baptized into.

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skierguy3y ago

I think a lot of the "religious" feeling I get from FP advocates is the constant focus on purity and the "No, you AREN'T DOING IT RIGHT!!!" kinds of tantrums. You HAVE to understand the nuance. You HAVE to participate in these strange little paradigms that esoteric thinkers have come up with. Ultimately, I think of FP languages like Haskell as playgrounds to pilot bleeding-edge ideas before the best ideas get incorporated into languages that are widely used in production.

Ultimately, some real-world processes are just procedural, and procedural languages are easier to apply to them. When it comes to callbacks, mapping functions to a list, etc., it's pretty clear to me that FP paradigms are superior.

In other words, I think it's part fad/religion, but as with anything, you can learn from it and take the good parts.

blep_3y ago

Most languages have already taken the good parts. We barely even consider them a "FP thing" anymore. Callbacks and map() are just things you can do in most languages.

What remains when people advocate for more FP is the more esoteric stuff. (And non-nullability, which inexplicably gets associated with FP surprisingly often despite being orthogonal to everything else in the paradigm.)

leidenfrost3y ago

Problem is, it's hard to distinguish the chaff from the wheat. A lot of practices that advertised themselves as "the way of the future" and most of them faded into nothingness.

At some point people try to save time and stick with practices that stand the test of time.

pdimitar3y ago

> Just thinking in composable, pure functions on projects buys you serious mileage

This is exactly where I was a called a zealot and gave up because it was obvious the other person felt attacked, as if I told them "you are an idiot for using procedural and imperative style all your career" -- which I absolutely didn't say or even imply.

Ultimately, selling someone on FP is selling them a new mental model and I think a lot of us how hard that is. People by default don't want to change the way think, it's a fact of life.

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