Conjecture: programming will become split between “just build my app” and an elite set of programmers who do the most demanding work, eg cloud infrastructure for Amazon, Google etc. The latter will mostly use FP, the former will use JS et al.
I think the reason most coders (and I include myself) don’t use FP is that we don’t have enough training in it, we often don’t have a strong mathematical background, and we have an imperative mindset. It’s harder to learn those things, it’s a different way of thinking than we use in our day to day lives - much like mathematics is difficult for most people to grasp, because it doesn’t come naturally to them. Humans are not theorem provers.
As competition for jobs soars and wages plummet (hello, remote work revolution!), more of the top X% of coders will be forced to learn FP to maintain their competitive advantage, and you’ll end up with a lot more people using it. Some of that will trickle down, but most of us will be writing JS rather than Haskell for the rest of our lives.
>> an elite set of programmers who do the most demanding work, eg cloud infrastructure for Amazon, Google etc. The latter will mostly use FP, the former will use JS et al.
I don't think this is true. In fact Go seems to be at the front and center of most of the Cloud Native infrastructure projects such as Kubernetes, Docker, Prometheus, and many others.
Wasn't a comment on the status quo, but rather the future.
I think the Go trend confirms my point: an isolated group of programmers have been able to adopt Go for that kind of infrastructure, but outside of those shops most people are quite determined never to use Go and rant about it a lot.
In the same way, Go will be replaced by FP and app developers will not go near it.
I think the reason most coders (and I include myself) don’t use FP is that we don’t have enough training in it, we often don’t have a strong mathematical background, and we have an imperative mindset. It’s harder to learn those things, it’s a different way of thinking than we use in our day to day lives - much like mathematics is difficult for most people to grasp, because it doesn’t come naturally to them. Humans are not theorem provers.
As competition for jobs soars and wages plummet (hello, remote work revolution!), more of the top X% of coders will be forced to learn FP to maintain their competitive advantage, and you’ll end up with a lot more people using it. Some of that will trickle down, but most of us will be writing JS rather than Haskell for the rest of our lives.