Comments on: The Rise of the Functional Paradigm https://programmingzen.com/the-rise-of-the-functional-paradigm/ Meditations on programming, startups, and technology Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:55:04 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 By: Joshua https://programmingzen.com/the-rise-of-the-functional-paradigm/#comment-26073 Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:55:04 +0000 http://antoniocangiano.com/?p=366#comment-26073 Wonderful post! I love the underlying idea in your article, that we are in the golden age of the functional paradigm.

I recently discovered Clojure and am in love with Lisp. I started programming with Perl in 2007, which I enjoyed very much. Then came Java and I’m still working on my OO proficiency, but somewhere along the line, things stopped being as much fun as they could be.

Functional programming makes coding interesting all over again! Wooooohooooooooooooo!!!

]]> By: Rogério Vicente https://programmingzen.com/the-rise-of-the-functional-paradigm/#comment-4617 Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:18:13 +0000 http://antoniocangiano.com/?p=366#comment-4617 Haskell opens up the mind. It’s a great language, and very interesting to play with. Functional programming is influencing most languages.

Great post.

]]> By: Dave https://programmingzen.com/the-rise-of-the-functional-paradigm/#comment-4532 Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:06:29 +0000 http://antoniocangiano.com/?p=366#comment-4532 Maybe rather than thinking about “objects vs. functional” the real win would be looking for “objects *and* functional”.

I suggest Common Lisp. One of the most powerful object systems. Functional if you want to program that way. Imperative when you don’t.

That said, Ruby is my favorite backup language. 😉

]]> By: JD https://programmingzen.com/the-rise-of-the-functional-paradigm/#comment-4519 Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:15:27 +0000 http://antoniocangiano.com/?p=366#comment-4519 I agree.

Fork Ruby!

-jd

]]> By: Jeff https://programmingzen.com/the-rise-of-the-functional-paradigm/#comment-4514 Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:26:56 +0000 http://antoniocangiano.com/?p=366#comment-4514 I must admit that I’ve never really given Ruby much of a look, but I do agree with you that functional programming seems to be on the rise. List comprehensions in Python are really nice.

I studied SML in a languages course a couple of years back, and I loved it. I remember having a lot of features in SML that I would have loved to have had in C++. A lot of them weren’t even functional specific features, rather they were features that had been researched and added to languages in recent years. Right now, I’m studying Lisp, and enjoying that as well.

]]> By: Mark Lee Smith https://programmingzen.com/the-rise-of-the-functional-paradigm/#comment-4513 Sun, 09 Nov 2008 16:11:29 +0000 http://antoniocangiano.com/?p=366#comment-4513 I can’t honestly see decades of research into object-oriented programming being thrown out with the bathwater.

The many significant problems of object-oriented programming were resolved years ago, but haven’t found there way out of the research labs yet! This is supremely unfortunate. Perhaps if people were more aware of this research they wouldn’t be so inclined to see functional programming as the future.

As it stands object-oriented languages aren’t as enticing as functional languages, and how could they be? These object-oriented languages embody the problems and limitations that existed at the dawn of the paradigm! That’s not to say that they’re bad language, they’re just based on tired ideas.

I don’t believe that the adoption of good ideas originally found is X constitute the rise of X. The adoption of good ideas is inevitable in any situation where the idea is widely known.

Smalltalk was arguably the first purely object-oriented language. What’s interesting is that Smalltalk has always had “lambda and closures”. Smalltalk isn’t functional or even multi-paradigm: it’s purely object-oriented.

Supporting feature set Z shouldn’t influence the classification of the language. The push to classify languages based on their support for Z isn’t only poorly thought out, it’s potentially damaging and I urge you: please stop it! Lest we label all new languages multi-fucking-paradigm, a term which conveys no meaningful information!

]]> By: Nuno https://programmingzen.com/the-rise-of-the-functional-paradigm/#comment-4510 Sun, 09 Nov 2008 07:13:39 +0000 http://antoniocangiano.com/?p=366#comment-4510 At my university the first kind programming paradigm we learn is functional. That makes a difference. It’s a tool to think the problems differently. It’s a way of seeing things, to see multiple solutions to the same problem and understand what makes one better than other for a specific purpose. It’s the correct way to learn to be a good developer (I have a nice Portuguese post on the subject that had a lot of feedback).

Anyway Haskell is not a joking language. I developed good applications in few lines of Haskell. I did a perfectly good looking sudoku application with the notion of strategy to solve a puzzle that could solve any normal puzzle in less than a second. It could solve the hardest possible sudoku problem (only one solution with 14 digits visible) in less then 5. Then the expressive power is huge. Lasy eval is also great for some tasks. And don’t forget how it’s so widely used in research. Haskell is all around in research.

Let me even tell you a little secret. I love ruby cause i need java to code for a company cause haskell won’t ever be mainstream (it’s just not that easy). but i would love to code haskell. everything. it’s so good. lamdba, compreension lists, recursion, catamorphisms. It’s awesome.

So in ruby i get what i need to make it work and understandable to others and still use some of the Haskell goodies winning the dynamic flavor. I’m just glad that languages like ruby showed the world the good parts on functional 🙂

BTW, you might have noticed I liked your post 🙂 Keep them coming 🙂

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