This article is a good example of why I don’t use uncommon programming languages for actual projects. I watched an Elm-based project steadily slip behind schedule while the team insisted that Elm and FP were actually going to save us a lot of time… eventually some day.
These uncommon FP frameworks and languages can be good tools in the right, experienced hands. They can also be fun for side projects and as learning exercises. But every time I’ve watched programmers try to use uncommon functional languages for real projects they end up like this article:
> More accurately, learning Functional Programming concepts used in Haskell in 3 months after having thrown out 30,000 lines of code on a project that was now monumentally behind schedule was the hardest thing I had to do in my career.
When you’ve reached the point of being severely behind schedule, throwing out mountains of code along the way, and struggling mightily just to get basic things accomplished: It’s time to stop. Don’t double down on a new language that you also have to learn from scratch. Pick something tried and true and get the work done. Revisit the functional language at a later time for an unimportant project or a side project, not something with a deadline.
If the programming language or ideology has become more important than shipping the project, we’ve lost the point.
Also the basic pitch of functional programming is "we have better abstractions, you'll write better code". The basic pitch of something like Java is "everyone knows how to get things done in Java" and of Python "there is a right way to get the task done, and we will tell you what that way is".
There is a fundamental mindset here that the Functional languages aren't task-first. Not in the languages, mind, it is in the community. And the tasks themselves can be so simple once the abstractions are under control that people don't write tutorials about the task.
It is visible in this article - the Haskell community is trying to convince this guy that he needs to know a wall of jargon from a relatively obscure branch of maths in order to program effectively. They may or may not be correct, but it is going to be a while before his attention makes it to the task at hand.
> It is visible in this article - the Haskell community is trying to convince this guy that he needs to know a wall of jargon from a relatively obscure branch of maths in order to program effectively. They may or may not be correct, but it is going to be a while before his attention makes it to the task at hand.
This seems to be the core problem in the communities, like you said: a tendency to believe that time spent learning the language or learning concepts or fighting with libraries or struggling with documentation doesn’t actually “count” towards time spent getting the job done.
I think this plays into our tendency to view learning and education as investments rather than costs. That may be true on a personal level when using your own time, but using your employer’s time to experiment with difficult new concepts and languages when you have a deadline approaching (or long since past) is not cool.
> using your employer’s time to experiment with difficult new concepts and languages when you have a deadline approaching (or long since past) is not cool.
As kindly as I can put it: I’d argue that within this sentiment are the foundations of everything wrong with the ecosystem of professional software engineering.
Let’s start with, if you don’t let people learn on the job, you have to have at least 20% annual turnover to be only 5 years behind the knowledge curve.
At 10% turnover, you’re 10 years behind. Managers think people shouldn’t be learning on company time, HR tells the board lower turnover is a goal.
Inevitable next step is pausing all productive work to undertake a “Digital Transformation™” to try to replace 20 years of old tech. But the firm won’t know how.
> Let’s start with, if you don’t let people learn on the job…
Learning in the job is great, within reason.
Abandoning all of your existing experience and trying to write new projects in a completely unfamiliar language with zero prior experience is not reasonable, though.
Learning isn’t a binary yes/no feature of a job. There is ample room for learning without allowing reckless decisions like trying to use Elm for server-side code when even the Elm authors are hostile to such a use case.
>> using your employer’s time to experiment with difficult new concepts and languages when you have a deadline approaching (or long since past) is not cool.
> As kindly as I can put it: I’d argue that within this sentiment are the foundations of everything wrong with the ecosystem of professional software engineering.
Almost all Software Engineering, as practiced, is not a form of engineering in any way. Many times Software Engineering is really a bunch of commodity workers, who are learning, assembling commodity components that don't really work, under the oversight of a more senior developer who helps everything not fall apart.
You might be interested to read Hillel Wayne's crossover project, where he interviewed a number of people who had worked in traditional engineering roles as well as in software development.
It’s pretty clear that these numbers are made up. Software engineering is an incredibly multi-dimensional field, and it is not a fact that learning on the job is beneficial to anyone let alone employers. And you assume so many things that will not always be true, like the fact that everything will always be changing in the field.
You may feel different, which is ok, but don’t bring made up numbers into it.
> using your employer’s time to experiment with difficult new concepts and languages when you have a deadline approaching (or long since past) is not cool.
It's in fact very cool. I get to take those skills with me when I leave in a few years :)
> using your employer’s time to experiment with difficult new concepts and languages when you have a deadline approaching (or long since past) is not cool.
To defend the counterpoint, artificial scarcity is abundant in the industry. Deadlines always approach, projects are already late. If employees don’t learn and improve on the job, employers will be happy to replace them.
> This seems to be the core problem in the communities, like you said: a tendency to believe that time spent learning the language or learning concepts or fighting with libraries or struggling with documentation doesn’t actually “count” towards time spent getting the job done.
Well... if you learn them on this project, they don't count for the next project. So in that sense, if it levels up your group, then you only pay the price once, but you reap the benefit for a long time.
For purposes of any one project, though... the time counts as overhead. It needs to pay off, or it's a waste.
>using your employer’s time to experiment with difficult new concepts and languages when you have a deadline approaching (or long since past) is not cool.
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I learn zygohistomorphic prepromorphisms on company time.
Every community does that though. Try to do something in Java and there will be hordes of people who tell you you need to learn a wall of jargon from Spring or Hibernate or JAX-whateveritis. Try to do something in Python and there will be people telling you you need to learn a bunch of Django stuff.
A lot of people put the cart before the horse - the whole point of using a monad or whatever is to let you write clear, straight-through code with plain functions and values, if you can do that without using a monad then that's even better. But I don't think that's an FP problem per se so much as a hammer-nail mentality or, worse, a mentality where if someone's spent a lot of time and effort learning something then they want to prove that it was worthwhile by forcing everyone else to put the same effort in.
I'll say this though: functional techniques really can save a lot of time. I'm not sure I'd recommend Scala for a new project if you don't have Scala experts already, but I apply ideas I got from my experience using it to projects all the time.
The question then is whether it was functional programming that actually made the difference, or the people who had enough perseverance and skill to actually learn Scala in the first place running the project.
I've found that people who go out of their way to learn things like that would be more productive regardless of the language itself.
>The question then is whether it was functional programming that actually made the difference, or the people who had enough perseverance and skill to actually learn Scala in the first place running the project.
Oof, it may indeed be the second, but what do they get out of the deal?
A lot of FP programmers refuse to go back, simply because it feels nicer.
It's a hell of a lot easier to "persevere" on a project when your language doesn't make you want to dig your eyes out with a spoon.
Well, the ideas I liked, stuff like deferring side effects and avoiding state, were functional ideas. You see a lot of functional concepts and constructs bleeding out into mainstream languages (just look at the last few C# releases, for instance, which look like a list of features borrowed from Scala), which I think will be their legacy more than widespread adoption.
one reason i asked is because while i don't really come from an FP background (as a student, i started with c/obj-c), after working in the field it was always appaling at how many variables and global state people would put in their code and how many side-effects were present... its just something that seemed so obvious even in "oop-land" but maybe im just an outlier...
I think that's been recognized for global state for a long time, but I think that mutating local or instance variables/collections wasn't really thought of the same way as much when I started doing this like 8 years ago.
Functional programming has the same problem as "AI" - as soon as something's adopted by the mainstream, it's "not really functional programming, just common sense". Ten years ago lambdas and map/reduce/filter were "functional programming"; now every language has them. Fifteen years ago having interfaces rather than just classes was "functional programming". Five years ago pattern matching was "functional programming"...
I argued recently that the core to functional programming is composition, rather than specific language features. This goes many ways, such as functional composition (using currying, higher order functions etc) and type composition (using algebraic types). Functional polymorphism using HKT's and typeclasses are also compositional.
Pattern matching, for example, is not itself 'functional programming', and never has been. It's a feature common in functional languages because it compliments algebraic types.
OO/Imperative languages (C# and Rust) getting pattern matching is useful but doesn't make them functional languages. C# and Rust are compositional in the sense types may implement interfaces (or traits), but with varying degrees of power. However, C# can't have HKT's until some work on the CLR is done, Rust is much closer.
Programmers (particularly web programmers) these days don't really consider the computational cost of their actions, so pure functions with immutable data types are now possible, despite the unnecessary allocation. Almost all popular OO architectures now are some variant of 'functional core, imperative shell'. There is definitely a 'functional shift'.
It makes me a little sad tbh, to see OO languages embrace FP principles. I just like writing tiny functions and types, gluing them together somehow (not how Haskell does it*), and building up to a bigger system. You can follow that approach in F# or OCaml, but it's not really possible in an OO language, regardless of how 'functional' it now is.
* Haskell is cool, but trying to explain to someone the difference between `.`, `$`, `<|>`, `|>`, `<$>`, `>>=` and more is quite painful.
>Haskell is cool, but trying to explain to someone the difference between `.`, `$`, `<|>`, `|>`, `<$>`, `>>=` and more is quite painful.
For those who aren't familiar, I'll explain:
First of all, these are all infix operators, meaning they take two parameters: one before the symbol, and one after. You already know many infix operators: +, -, %, etc. I'll be surrounding them in parentheses, as that's idiomatic when they're not being used in the infix position.
(.) is compose: run one function, then feed its result into the other.
($) is just a tool for avoiding parentheses. It means "wrap everything after this in a set of parens".
(<|>) is alternative. Try one computation that can fail. If it doesn't work, try the other.
(|>) is either snoc (the opposite of cons) or pipe--as in bash--depending on what you have imported.
(<$>) is the general form of map, called fmap in Haskell (since map is just for lists). Given a function and a value inside a container, return the function applied to the value, inside the container.
(>>=) ah, bind. One half of the interface to the famously difficult monad. It's really not that hard, conceptually: run a computation, then use the result of that to run another computation. You might say "that sounds like compose!" and you'd be right. The difference is that a "computation" (or "action", or whatever your local monad tutorial calls it) is a function in a context. That context can be "it might not exist", which is called Maybe, or "there are a lot of values in order", which is called List, or "it can do side effectful IO", which is called, well, IO. If you want to compose those kinds of computations, you need to also "compose" their contexts as well. The implentation of that composition varies from context to context, but the interace is the same: (>>=), or bind.
Of course, conceptually is the easy part. This is the one operator in your list that can be a little difficult to gain an intuition for.
It's both. You can defer side effects, and avoid state in most other languages; but it's not enforced, or encouraged; and might even be tedious. The difference with functional languages, is that they encourage or enforce deference of side effects, and avoidance of state.
That’s certainly a big part. The other one is less obvious, but is one that shines through this article as well. Once you learned a functional language or any language that is well designed (for me that typically incorporates functional and possibly logic and relational paradigms) then you’ll be more confident and productive than before and will have a hard time to justify using a tool that is inferior other than adherence to the lowest common denominator.
I’m sure this can be observed with any profession. A good cook can work with a cheap knife and mediocre ingredients, but give them a nice set of professional kitchen tools and fresh, tasty vegetables and they will happily cook you a meal that makes your evening.
a good language would allow you to express thoughts that are difficult in another language. But this presumes that you have those thoughts to express in the first place. If you don't, the language isn't gonna magically be able to give you the ability to have those thoughts.
So learning functional languages is both learning the language, but to also improve your cognitive capabilities to have more thoughts.
I wouldn't say the used an uncommon language. They build some kind of tool to run on top of Elm which wasn't inline with the goals of the Elm project (unlcear how). Seems like something that should've been investigated before commiting
It is inevitable that someone will use a language in the way the developers didn't intend, but this is the only time I've heard of the developers specifically setting out to break their language for some users.
I think it's more that you shouldn't use a tool that you're incompetent at. It has nothing to do with how common or not it is. Just know what you're doing or don't do it.
> I think it's more that you shouldn't use a tool that you're incompetent at. It has nothing to do with how common or not it is.
These two points are closely related, though.
Common tools will always have more available programmers, more documentation, more tutorials, more help, more libraries, more maturity.
We had a server written in a functional language at a company I worked at. It was fine, but when the two people who wrote it left the company it became a huge pain point to even hire someone to work on it. Consultants knew this and demanded exorbitant fees for basic work on the project.
Eventually we just rewrote it from scratch in a common language and saved a huge amount of time and money compared to trying to build teams and schedules around this obscure language.
id tell you duh, and go actually has (or will have soon) the pieces for the majority of the daily useful functional programming concepts. namely first class and polymorphic functions.
As far as I know, the Future concept for async/await started with Twisted's Deferred, which is a framework for Python. It's not really from functional land.
Futures were first proposed in 1976, in a book called "The Impact of Applicative Programming on Multiprocessing". [0]
Applicative programming is an older term for functional programming[1], but note this isn't pure functional programming like in Haskell; it's functional programming like in Scheme and Javascript.
> Futures were first proposed in 1976, in a book called "The Impact of Applicative Programming on Multiprocessing".
According to Wikipedia, Promises were, Futures (which are similar but not identical) were proposed in a 1977 paper. All of the closely related concepts of promises, futures, logic variables, and dataflow variables were used in functional languages first, and long before their use in, or the existence of, Twisted.
> Really I think the mistake there was not forking Elm.
Forking a framework and trying to maintain a new, separate open source project is a huge burden. There is no way that would have fixed their problems of being behind schedule, but it definitely would have permanently worsened their maintenance overhead.
They needed to scrap the alternate language/framework plans and return to something safe and proven as soon as it became obvious that they were too far off track. Continuing to double down on commitments to unpopular frameworks (or worse, creating your own niche fork to maintain) would only worsen the problem.
Rather than forking elm, there's purescript, which is unlike elm in all the restrictive ways. It seems to have regular releases and plenty of packages as well.
Or port over to bucklescript-tea (a port of the Elm architecture to the OCaml-to-JS compiler BuckleScript) using the Philip2 migration tool, which was announced almost a year before OP was published: https://medium.com/darklang/philip2-an-elm-to-reasonml-compi...
I agree. Assuming this article is about the author’s experiences in early 2019, Elm has only had one release since then. They wouldn’t have missed out on much at all by shipping with a forked compiler but would have gained a lot of time to migrate.
The fork wouldn’t necessarily need to be public either.
I mostly agree. However you could use the same argument to dismiss any programming language the moment any team is failing using the language. No programming language has a zero fail track record. Because success depends on context and team much more than programming language.
FP is absolutely way more time-efficient for most kinds of projects, if you know what you’re doing. Switching without having sufficient background first is probably not a good idea though.
> FP is absolutely way more time-efficient for most kinds of projects
I absolutely do not agree.
FP binds your particular choice of implementation to the code architecture. FP actually makes refactoring in the small trivial and refactoring in the large ferociously difficult.
A good example would be a program that runs fine suddenly now needs a "timeout" on an operation. FP implementations now need to thread the notion of time from somewhere near the top of the implementation the whole way down the chain to the function that needs "time".
This is painful.
An imperative programmer throws in a global time variable, possibly a local timeout variable and gets on with life.
Now, if I'm trying to manage a high-complexity codebase, I will probably eat the FP penalty. Having complete determinism, decoupling, and visibility in, say, a network stack makes debugging possible that will be very difficult with sorta-state smeared across a bunch of variables at various level of hierarchy.
However, I accept and acknowledge that I am making a tradeoff.
> An imperative programmer throws in a global time variable, possibly a local timeout variable and gets on with life.
Which actually destroys the ability to refactor in the large. You have no idea what might use that global time variable from where or why. Choosing to use FP is choosing to ban yourself from taking on that kind of tech debt (although we should note that most FP languages have an "escape hatch" if you need it - even in Haskell you can always unsafePerformIO). There are definitely times where you want to do that, but I don't think it's right to frame that as the non-functional language making things easier to refactor in the large - rather the non-functional language makes it easier to not refactor in the large because you don't fully decouple things in the large in the first place.
> FP actually makes refactoring in the small trivial and refactoring in the large ferociously difficult
This is not at all my experience, in fact I'd say I encountered the opposite. Large scale refactoring in C++ and python were nightmarish and are a breeze in Julia and Elixir.
>A good example would be a program that runs fine suddenly now needs a "timeout" on an operation. FP implementations now need to thread the notion of time from somewhere near the top of the implementation the whole way down the chain to the function that needs "time".
A sufficiently complicated FP codebase almost certainly has some form of effects management in place (monad transformers or algebraic effects, for instance), so adding a timeout is as simple as adding the effect to the type signature at the top level and then letting the compiler tell you all the places you need to wire it up. I've done this in many codebases. It's actually a dream, as the type system won't allow you to make a mistake.
> A good example would be a program that runs fine suddenly now needs a "timeout" on an operation. FP implementations now need to thread the notion of time from somewhere near the top of the implementation the whole way down the chain to the function that needs "time".
I mean, 'FP' is so broad a term that a lot of languages fall under that, almost all of which can introduce the concept of a timeout quite easily. E.g. OCaml's Lwt, or Scala's ZIO are two that quickly come to mind.
20 years experience with OO code. Over time, OO always leads to entanglement due to inheritance based solutions that seemed like a good idea at the time. Eventually, these become the basis for many other parts of the system.
You combine the potential for side effects in the code with a tree that can't easily be changed because of how many other things it will negatively affect and you end up with a code base that is harder and harder to change the larger it gets.
In a FP approach, this is a class of problems that you can't easily replicate. Yes there's a learning curve to operating in a FP style, but once you're able to move quickly with it the long term rewards are a byproduct.
The OO solution to avoiding this problem is to build with microservices instead, which forces different parts of the system to be isolated and minimizes the negative effects from entanglement...but microservices come with their own maintenance and speed of development headaches as well.
35 years of OO experience here. Maintaining very large C++ code bases. I never have OO entanglement problems due to inheritance based solutions. Why? Because I only use inheritance for interfaces. Nothing else.
I know what I’m doing in many languages, and I’m uniformly more productive with the FP ones. The only time I’ll reach for a non-FP language is if I’m forced to for work or if I’m working on an embedded system with no allocator.
I would love to know that there is a panacea that automatically improves productivity. Unfortunately, I haven't seen one in my career, as yet.
I am certainly more happy in many functional languages. And I can see happiness contributing to some. But I can't count that as data, without RCTs or something similar.
I'm not going to go so far as to claim that computer science isn't science. But I do fear that there are more claims than there are checks in our industry.
>I would love to know that there is a panacea that automatically improves productivity. Unfortunately, I haven't seen one in my career, as yet.
I suspect you've seen many of them. They're just the ones that are so normal you don't notice anymore. For instance, no one does pure waterfall-style project management anymore. "goto" programming has completely dissappeared. Etc.
I wouldn’t say it “automatically improves productivity” - I suspect it might be limited to more intelligent and/or mathematically inclined programmers. That said, I think for many programmers not using it is a huge and pointless missed opportunity. This is one of those visibly high-return arbitrages that it pains me to see go unexploited.
"mathematically inclined programmers."
This kind of programmers are literally the worst I met in 25 years of carreer. They are underperforming very badly compared to others.
In fact I worked mainly with java and .NET C# in the past 2 decades ... Now I'm more into Node and Javascript ... I worked mainly in finance, banks and insurances. This is where I met all those underperforming math-oriented peoples. Most of the time they where not able to find a job in their field and went to programming as a way to earn money, not by passion like ALL the best engineers I met.
That's the problem with "uncommon": how do you obtain that background and how do you learn what you're doing? (of course, not just you - you, the entire team, and future hires)
The same way you learn anything else that is difficult: time and practice, and start with fundamentals. You can't put it on any work-related critical path until you have it down solid.
I mean in the context of an existing company / team of nontrivial size. Most cases I know of, the uncommon language was there from the days of it being a personal or 1-person project. For other types of tech (e.g. infrastructure) sometimes the new/different capabilities are such a defining feature that the lack of familiarity is not as scary. But in programming languages, you can fundamentally do pretty much anything in existing and well known ones.
Have fun writing a web app in assembly language ;). Yes it's been done, but not often, and for good reason. Haskell is sort of a special case: it's best suited for writing compilers, but has been pressed into just about everything else because people are into it for its own sake.
Yes if you're running a C++ shop and someone leaves behind a small program in Haskell, you're probably better off reimplementing it than becoming or hiring a Haskell guru just to maintain that thing. That's a question of whether to learn Haskell, not how to learn it. In the case of the linked article, the author was the one who decided to get the company involved with FP, and gave his thoughts on whether it was worth it.
I can certainly support the idea that someone juggling all the plates required to keep a company running, has no time to embark on a deep and nerdy self-education project in something as abstruse as FP. Better to keep it at the level of a side interest or hobby until you're comfortable with it, before even thinking of doing anything important with it.
most "failed" FP projects I've seen mostly lack the former - often due to managers or engineers that come on the project after it first hits prod
then comes the rewrite to add a notch in said managers' and engineers' belts
then the original FPers leave and now there's systems in prod with little to no people who can work on it. that rewrite suddenly got a lot more business-critical!
the original FPers weren't as PM-savvy, so the rewrite is successful despite having less functionality and still taking a year or more. doesn't matter - the savvier managers and engineers know how to set goals & milestones that they know they'll hit and can say that they hit when evaluating the project's success
This is just a summary of my years of experience as an FP professional. I've seen this happen 3+ times across 3+ companies.
---
Haskell is by far the most worth-it skill I've cultivated. It wasn't easy but I really do do a 10x job on my personal projects in large part due to it. It's just not a good language to use in a corporate setting. It's better to get paid big bucks to be less productive. Save the technical brainpower for things you yourself find valuable :)
(and I sneak Haskell in all my jobs anyways - scripting, for instance - so I still develop my Haskell knowledge on company time & dime, despite the language being all-but-banned by the higher-ups)
My previous employer would teach new employees to use a functional language from scratch and people would be productive in 2-3 weeks. I don’t think it’s actually that difficult in reality.
> FP is absolutely way more time-efficient for most kinds of projects, if you know what you’re doing.
That may or may not be true, but most programmers don't and aren't really all that interested in learning. Most know what they are doing in a handful of Algol-derived mostly-imperative OO-ish languages and aren't comfortable goony much afield from that.
It's not hard at all. It's routinely taught to beginners.
However, it's not a silver bullet. I found that basic software engineering principles are way more important than the language. I've seen extremely messy OCaml code and super clean C code. What is important is how the code is organized at high level. Whether you use a for loop or a fold, an error monad or an exception mechanism matters less.
I'm also wary of functional programming gurus that tend to over-abstract things and use all the language latest features, making code very hard to read.
Also, when developing in a niche language, you tend to miss important tools and need to rely on unstable third-party libraries.
I used to be quite enthusiastic about FP, but I think I'd stick with more mainstream languages unless there's a good reason not to.
Programming is about clearly communicating theory.
Mariners use "port" and "starboard" for vehicle relative directions not because it's "cool" but because it's clear and unambiguous. Problem decomposition works the same way: some problems decompose better with FP (I would argue databases do) some with OOP, some with EF etc. The more you know the clearer code you can write and the faster you can extract the theory from other people's code.
Fun fact: the "port" side used to frequently be called "larboard" until the British Royal Navy realized it was too easily confused with "starboard" and ordered sailors to stop using the term. After that it gradually fell out of favor.
"Port", "starboard" are unambiguously defined relative to the vessel. "Left" and "right" require specifying or guessing a point of reference.
For instance if you're facing port and I ask you to take two steps forward, you could either take two steps to port or two steps towards the bow. If I tell you to take two steps to port then the direction is unambiguous.
No it isn't because the term was invented specifically to avoid this confusion -- it means "left from the perspective of the performer facing the audience".
It's the difference between "forward for you" and "forward for the boat". Without words like "port", you might do the wrong thing when I say "take one step forward". Did I mean for you to go further in the direction you're already facing, or did I want you to step towards the prow?
We use similar approaches with terrestrial navigation too.
At the intersection of Main and Oak, go two blocks east. The building will be on the north side of the street.
Those instructions are the same no matter what direction the person is facing or direction they came from.
However, on a ship, the absolute positions of NSEW (relative to the Earth) aren't as useful as the ship may be heading any direction (and may be going forward or reverse). So a different absolute coordinate system is use - fore, aft, port, starboard.
It's not as unambiguous because, to the guy with his back to starboard, forward could just as easily mean port! It may seem clear if someone's shouting, and pointing, at the bow, but if I'm recounting the action of a tense combat scene and say he "slips on a banana peel and falls 'forward'", you can't know for sure what I mean- does he fall straight towards port, or does he a break a leg, twisting, tumbling toward the bow? c:
The alternatives are left and right respectively. They're more clear because left and right are usually relative to the speaker or listener who may be facing each other and are often moving around.
As a former US Navy Sailor, port and starboard are pretty clear. Along with Forward and Aft. These are things relative to the ship and points in which everyone is aware of on a ship. If I say starboard, that is right of the center of the ship. Port is left of center line of the ship.
a) They refer to left and right, not front and back (which I believe would be "forward" and "aft").
b) With the possible exception of "forward", if you hear one of these words you always know it's specifying a direction relative to the direction the boat is pointing, which is not true for "left" and "right".
Often just fore instead of forward, or a particular pronunciation like for’d for “the front of the boat as opposed to in front of the speaker”.
Lots of other jargon too for other directions or places (leeward, windward, amidships, athwartships, etc) but that is all much less common than the four listed above.
Windward and leeward are still commonly used in my experience.
Also, there's a fun additional distinction for forward and aft, which is that they tend to refer to locations within the vessel. Ahead and astern are used to refer to locations outside of the vessel.
After about 8 years of sailing fairly regularly with various crews, I still get many of the terms mixed up. For instance, stanchions and shrowds are terms that are useful, but they never seen to come to mind when I need to communicate them.
Right! Why use port when left is right? Nonmariners left starboard right at port, left port there as well. Maybe modern mariners should port left back to their lexicon before they're left behind.
> I'm also wary of functional programming gurus that tend to over-abstract things and use all the language latest features, making code very hard to read.
Wanted to echo this point.
I'm a huge FP proponent, and I do believe that liberal use FP paradigms can result in code that's in many ways measurably more expressive and less complex than code that make liberal use of imperative looping, in-place mutation, and inheritance, etc. When I'm coding on my own for side projects, I always strive to use the most elegant and expressive FP constructs I can think of.
However, at the end of the day, most of the coding we do is part of a social activity. And in a social setting, familiarity matters.
Writing slightly less expressive, more complex code in a way that most people who read it will be already familiar with can result in more productivity in aggregate than writing code that's super expressive and simple but requires everyone reading it to first learn the paradigms/patterns that enabled the code to be written that way, especially in a fast growing startup where people are constantly onboarding into the codebase.
Optimizing too much for familiarity can also become detrimental though, in that it results in stagnation and closes the doors to paradigms/patterns that can have an outsized impact on overall productivity compared to their cost in learning/education.
The real challenge is striking a good balance between familiarity and expressiveness in the choice of paradigms/patterns to use.
> What is important is how the code is organized at high level.
This was often forgotten about OOP as well, as Alan Kay himself reminds us...
"The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be."
> However, it's not a silver bullet. I found that basic software engineering principles are way more important than the language. I've seen extremely messy OCaml code and super clean C code. What is important is how the code is organized at high level. Whether you use a for loop or a fold, an error monad or an exception mechanism matters less.
Agreed, developers are great at finding new ways to write questionable code no matter what languages or programming paradigms claim about their respective abilities to reduce code errors and smells. I know because I'm one of them.
Agree. I can program in pure languages like Haskell, Idris etc. but still prefer to program ‘in anger” in OO languages. Having easy access to mutable state is just so damn convenient. As long as you are careful how you do it. Mutable state is a very sharp tool so be careful when you use it.
For one, languages like golang prevent over engineering or bad practice. I’ve never read unintelligible golang code. Some might abuse the interface{} but that’s the worse that you’ll see. Not bad compared to some other languages.
Most people are taught from day 1 to code in some combo of imperative and OOP styles.
The issue is not that FP is hard to learn. The issue is that most people start off from a much lower baseline knowledge-wise than they will when learning a new imperative and/or OOP language, framework, etc.
I come from the OOP school and have done 10s-100s(?) of C/C++ projects, which I like, btw. But when I discovered FP it was an eye opener, the breadth of things that became possible/tractable is great, even my OOP programs became much better because of it.
I think that the OOP curriculum is actually a regression, and would recommend anyone who is just starting out to try out FP first.
As someone who only dabbles in code, I’m very interested in starting FP first, but I find that the beginner tutorials mostly assume previous programming knowledge/skills, and the communities aren’t really geared towards folks who don’t have backgrounds from other areas.
It is certainly possible I’m not looking in the right place for the right thing, but it should probably be an area of improvement for those communities in the future IMO.
It appears to exclusively work with the usual FP understanding of computation as reduction (simplification of an expression), avoiding all named mutable state. This is (in my opinion) the most important and fundamental difference between functional and imperative, and is something you miss if you try to learn FP in, say, JavaScript.
It also doesn't seem to assume any prior experience with programming. The last chapter even has a section specifically directed at students who aren't computer scientists or software developers.
The 1st year computer science programming class at Waterloo is based on the 1st edition of this book. (Not sure why not the 2nd edition--the waterloo website says so. [1])
The authors of this book are some of the major folks behind the Racket programming language. Mattias Felleisen, Matthew Flatt, Robert Findler, Shriram Krishnamurthi.
You might recognize Shriram Krishnamurthi's name in the credits to PG's guide to Bel too [1]
I didn't really use this book much directly - when I took that class in 2012, I mostly learned via the lectures, lecture slides, and doing via the assignments. The book is probably sufficient and you can probably talk to other people about it via Racket subreddit, IRC, etc
Hey! I am writing an ebook about high-level programming concepts that starts off with a FP view point and builds on top of it. If that sounds interesting, I'd love to share (I am eventually going to sell it but I am fine giving away drafts)
Yeah I agree with you in that there's definitely a steep curve for newcomers. Some work on that is needed, but it's coming along, take @blagovest's comment as an example.
As with anything in life, just don't give up. Everything sucks till it's finished :D
Exactly. I came from a math background and only ever used Wolfram Mathematica for programming, and naturally used functional programming. Later on I tried to learn imperative programming and it boggled my mind. The idea of changing a state over and over seemed so janky to me.
This is an oft-repeated canard. The fact is that "OOP/Imperative" happens to align with how the human brain works, and how to a large extent reality works. Some aspects of FP also align with reality and mental processes (e.g. pure functions, comprehensions), but others do not (e.g. closures, monads, lambdas).
I think FP advocates (I'd count myself as one, sometimes) like to gloss over this aspect and instead blame the student for being too stupid, or for having been indoctrinated in the dark side too much.
FP I believe would be better received without the smugness surrounding "you're too dumb or too much of a dinosaur to understand". Be more like Dave Farley.
I disagree, I don't think Imperative aligns with the human brain. Humans have thought thru problems for millenia before computers existed. For a 1700s mathamatician to solve a problem in grueling, iterative steps that loop and change a state would be seen as a boneheaded caveman method. Pure functions were the norm of elegance in the olden days of famous polymaths. I didn't grow up with access to any computer, but I did a lot of mathematics, so going from that to Imperative thinking was super jarring and not natural at all.
It's just the Haskell family of functional programming languages that is hard to pick up. There are plenty of functional language families that are quite easy to understand and much more pragmatic:
* ML - includes SML, OCaml, F#, Scala, and Rust
* Lisp - includes Common Lisp, Racket, Scheme, Clojure
* Actor Model - includes Erlang, Elixir, and Pony, as well as other languages that have actor model systems at the library level
You'll find endless sources of opinions on why the Haskell family is so hard to use well. My personal opinion is that most languages create abstractions with concrete types of problems in mind. Haskell created abstractions with other types of abstractions in mind. If you ask the question "what is a monad used for?", the average Haskell user isn't going to respond in any form about making side effects safer, because that's just one thing that they do...they're going to respond with other abstractions. And after 45 minutes of explanations of what they are, they still haven't yet gotten to the explanation of what you can do with it. And then when you finally understand what you can actually do with it, you have to confront the fact that they made an incredibly easy thing hard, just in case you might want to use it a different way.
Scala and ocaml suffer from the same reputation. SML didn't really make it out of the academia. F# is easier, but still has a bad rap from C#ers. Rust is making incredible efforts to be accessible, but the learning curve is still steep.
One could say haskell itself is also an offspring of the ML family.
In that family, the article author correctly identified that Elm is probably among the most accessible. Choosing a specific application domain enabled the language creators to cut a lot of complexity, and to use a simple state machine as a runtime.
> If you ask the question "what is a monad used for?"
You'll get the same kind of answers as you'd get you'd get when asking Java programers what this "class" concept is about. The functor-applicative-monad stack is at the heart of Haskell's flavor of functional programming. You can write small programs without it, of course, but it's going to be the same experience as writing Java with a single "main" class.
A few nits: I would not put Scala in the ML category (I'm not sure about Rust). Haskell is, in-fact an ML. Racket is a Scheme. I would consider the actor model to be more OO than FP.
Scala may be hybrid OO/FP, but Martin Odersky has been absolutely clear that Scala's primary functional programming design was inspired by ML. At various times in the past, he has referred to Scala as OCaml with a different object model. I believe I read a post on Reddit quite a few years back from Martin Odersky about how he originally intended to only have structural typing, a-la SML, but when the decision was made to implement Scala on top of the JVM, that nominal typing made it's way in, with an object model that was closer to Java than OCaml, for interop purposes.
Rust's primary influence was ML. The compiler was originally written in OCaml. In fact, Graydon Hoare has commented about how he preferred OCaml's module-based polymorphism, but the Haskell advocates would never shut up about type classes so he eventually relented on that one single idea and implemented traits. But he held on to OCaml's ideas for almost everything else, at least until the point where he resigned his BDFL position.
Haskell has some ML influence, but it received that influence via Miranda. Miranda deliberately diverged from ML in the operator emphasis, and execution (lazy vs eager). They both might have been considered at arm's length with the ML family right up until the point (1990ish) that Haskell decided to eliminate all unpure IO and adopt Monadic IO. There is almost no resemblance anymore, and the functional programming community is very cleanly divided: you're either in the ML camp or you're in the Haskell camp, unless you're one of the few Lisp weirdos sitting in the corner singing hippy songs.
The actor model does have a lot of roots in functional programming (as well as logic programming), but you're right that it is also related to modern OO programming insofar as most modern OO languages inherited a ton from Smalltalk, which was a similar message-passing model. However, unlike Smalltalk, the actor-oriented languages rely on immutable state and pure state transition functions. That makes them functional languages at least in some respects.
Lisp is not a pure functional language. So it won’t teach you FP in its pure form. I already knew how to program in Lisp/Scheme/Clojure before learning Haskell. But wow what a difference it was.
Agreed. I would bet on a language like Elixir or F# being simpler to learn and grow for a complex system than a class-oriented-imperative-oop (Java, Ruby, Python, etc) language any day.
F# is such a sleeper language IMO. It's compositional tools are quite beautiful. I don't think it'll ever get wide adoption though, which is quite sad. It's just such a sensible ML language. The abstractions chosen (computational expressions, for example) were the best choice for F#, rather than copies of other FP languages. They can't implement any form of HKT because of limitations in the CLR, so they had to use alternatives.
Elixir is also really great IMO. The pipeline composition is a really nice model. If adoption grows more the tooling should step up, because it's lacking a little. The language server can't do things like rename a function, there isn't a complete TreeSitter parser either. I also have this fear with actor model that I'm inadvertantly leaving some process dangle somewhere, which in my experience is not unjustified.
I would dip my toes into FP occasionally (but very, very briefly) for years. I bought a book on Scheme in 1995, to give you a sense of how long I wandered in the wilderness.
It wasn't until I discovered Erlang in 2012 (thanks, Seven Languages in Seven Weeks) that I finally found the motivation, aided in no small part by the fact that it's a very simple language and it's designed for server programming, where I've always been happiest.
I still haven't graduated into category theory or type theory. I still don't know the difference between a monad and a monoid. But functional programming really speaks to me, because I have an old, tired brain and I need pure functions wherever I can employ them to keep things straight.
Pure functions concept was a breakthrough for me too. As a design pattern they are wonderful, there is so much less mental context to keep track of.
Now whenever I see mutated variables and class attributes, or random side effects besides reading/writing to a database, it kinda makes me cringe and think it's a "oh here we go" into a rabbit hole just to understand what the code is doing. 9/10 the code does what it's supposed to, but the mutations and side effects makes understanding and extending it so much harder.
A monoid is just a collection of things that can be associatively "added". Think addition with integers, or append with lists.
Members of the dreaded monad can be sequenced, or composed, while taking into account their context. For instance: if I want to get a value from stdin, then use that value safely; or make a network request and then use the result safely; or run a function that can fail, and use it or short-circuit as needed.
My two cents is that anything is hard to learn without an application you can test your knowledge against. It’s always hard to learn language X until you go ahead and build something in it.
Functional programming is hard because in a lot of cases, especially ones beginners encounter, the imperative solution is simpler. Purity and types are things I think you only truly appreciate when you’re writing large or complicated programs. I wasn’t able to really grasp FP (beyond using things like map() in Python) until I took a compilers course which used OCaml, and the ability to pass around and destruct these very complicated immutable trees was a very natural problem to tackle in the domain
> My two cents is that anything is hard to learn without an application you can test your knowledge against. It’s always hard to learn language X until you go ahead and build something in it.
If it's something really new and different, like Haskell is to an old school imperative programmer, I think the opposite approach is best. Treat it like a topic in math, start from zero, work out small problems to exercise the basic concepts, then start putting them together.
Immutable data structures are another new and shocking thing, but less complicated than fancy typed FP is. Start with seeing how you can "update" the first element of a linked list by making a new first element and linking it to the existing tail. Then see how AVL or red-black trees let you do something similar with tree nodes in log(N) time, so you can use those instead of hash tables without a monstrous slowdown. That's probably all you need, but the next thing after is probably Chris Okasaki's book Purely Functional Data Structures. It is pretty readable once you've seen some basics.
It was two courses actually, the first was taught out of https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/2019sp/textbook/ and the professors personal notes on the history of programming language design, and the second was taught primarily out of Andrew Appel’s tiger book with some content from the dragon book
I think Haskell is kind of hard to learn for these main reasons: what you know from imperative programming mostly doesn't transfer, you kind of need to know a pretty big set of library functions in order to be productive, and for practical programs you often need to know a few tricks that aren't obvious that allow you to mix pure code and mutable state (how to exploit laziness, how and when to use the ST monad, what should be in the IO monad, etc..).
Additional roadblocks are that the syntax is strange if you're not familiar with ML-derived languages, the type system is fairly complex and you need to understand quite a bit of it to make progress, laziness can cause performance problems (lost parallelism, excessive memory use) if you're not careful, and the tooling isn't always as user friendly as it could be.
That said, I'm glad I learned Haskell, and though I don't know everything about the language, these days I'd feel pretty comfortable using it for anything I'd use any other decently-performing garbage collected high-level language for.
I would add, Haskell is bad at naming stuff, especially function arguments and generic type parameters. It has a tradition of point-free style which deliberately avoids names, and when names are required, they're typically meaningless single-letters. This makes it hard to build intuition and to follow code.
For example, the main Haskell graph library (fgl) has two type parameters, named 'a' and 'b'. Instead of meaningless letters, why not 'NodeLabel' and 'EdgeLabel'? Now it's obvious what they mean!
Yeah, that example seems like not-very-good naming. The standard library uses a lot of terse names, but that's often because in a lot of cases the types could be almost anything. Might as well just call them a, b, and c.
There's another general principle that the length of the names of variables should scale with the size of the context in which they're meaningful. So, a 10,000 line program might use a four-or-five syllable name, whereas a one-line function that takes two arbitrary arguments can just call them "x" and "y".
I do agree that points-free style and terse code can be problematic. Haskell lets you use very high levels of abstraction, but if the next person to look at your code doesn't understand those abstractions it'll tend to look like gibberish. I think my own preference tends to be not to go out of my way to make the program extra terse unless there's some compelling reason, like avoiding a lot of repetition.
I think plain old low-level C code is (sometimes) easy to read just because it has a lot of visual cues like "for" loops that your brain can pattern match on to tell you what the general control flow is. In higher level code, you often end up with fewer visual cues. Which is good in the sense that it eliminates redundancy, but bad in the sense that it can take longer to understand what unfamiliar code actually does.
Something that seems to happen in Haskell more than other languages I've used is that sometimes you can kind of forget how the lower layers of abstraction actually work, and it sort of just does what you want as if by magic. For example, the Lens library let's you update data structures using a syntax similar to imperative languages, but behind the scenes it's actually constructing a new data structure from the root on down to the "edited" leaf, and (unlike in imperative languages generally) if something goes wrong you can just throw up your hands and error out, and the old data structure is still there. It's like the convenience of imperative languages, but with transactions practically for free. But the type signatures that the Lens library uses are fantastically complicated. Though I sort of understand what the Lens library does, I really have no idea how it works internally. And I've decided that that's actually fine.
Functional Programing is hard to learn because it literally changes the neural pathways in your brain. Once you learn it, there is no going back : your grey matter will be changed forever.
I used it a lot in the past, and less nowadays (Rust), but I occasionally have to teach my coworkers on basic FP principles so they can use and write good Python code. Simple descriptions make the learning more palatable and doesn’t scare people (“you could use a Monoid here” -> “Try using a class like this, with an `empty` and `combine` function, here”).
It usually takes about 6 months of daily practice to learn basic FP skills and 1-2 years to go from beginner to “intermediate” level. Occasionally, you might encounter a FP grandmaster who will melt your brain in less than 2 minutes of conversation, some things never change.
So true! It's a tough disease to catch but totally incurable.
Once you have the bug, you start to pick-up code smell in anything that isn't functional. You see code and ask, "Why are we touching that?, Why are we holding onto this?" Being able to think in a functional style encourages you to throw away as much code as possible and hang-on to as few crufty elements of state as are minimally required.
It also makes you very anti-OOPS and hesitant to define "classes," since these violate the first principles of functional.
I have a good 30 years of C/C++ under my belt and have been learning Haskell for the last 4 years. You can write a buggy version of a program in C after spending an afternoon learning it. You can write a bug-free version in haskell but you'll be spending a few weeks worrying about monads.
I think C just looks easier because you can learn enough to be dangerous without much effort, getting to a level where you can write reasonably safe C will take a lot longer than getting to that same level in Haskell.
After trying to join in on the monad jokes for forever, I opened up the the Wikipedia page on Monads (in the functional programming context, not the page in raw category theory) and it actually kinda made sense.
The problem that made monads make sense for me was when I had to chain (err, val) tuples for six or seven functions that only took val and handling the (err, _) bit was awkward. Someone showed how to rewrite it using monads to handle that without the boilerplate and voila.
I strongly suggest starting with a language like Elm to get into FP, since you start to use `map` and `andThen` quite often, but you also get sick of writing `a |> Result.andThen fn1 |> Result.andThen fn2`. This can help a programmer realize why it might be better to have a concise syntax for this, like:
myFun : String -> Result String Int
myFun a =
do b <- fn1 a
c <- fn2 b
return c
That said, I think the other problem with Haskell is the definition of the bind operator: it is not obvious to a beginner which concrete function is actually being called for each monadic operation. Idris2, for instance, lets you specify the bind operator in its do notation[0].
I think it'd become Just Another Monad Tutorial. Its something that clicks after a bit of FP programming without monads. Simon Peyton-Jones wrote a good paper about how IO worked prior to Monads which is nice - context helps with these things. I remember struggling to understand OO until I got my first junior dev role so I do think it's just practice practice practice to get through these things.
I like the way that "Learn You a Haskell" puts it:
"If we have a fancy value and a function that takes a normal value but returns a fancy value, how do we feed that fancy value into the function?"
That's basically all a monad is. If you know what map() does (in Haskell terms, map is a "functor"), then you know what a monad is, as it's just a fancy map().
I had a chance to speak with John Backus when I worked at IBM where he invented functional programming with the goal of removing some of the spaghetti and incomprehensibility of imperative and procedural code. It certainly was not an immediate hit!
Despite being an IBM Fellow (the company's highest rank with complete freedom to work on whatever you want), John was having trouble getting any traction for his ideas. I certainly didn't grok it at the time. I couldn't see the utility over the procedural PL/AS and imperative assembler we were already using to create the mainframe's higher-level language compilers.
I've since become a big believer in the functional style, sadly after John's passing. It's certainly not the solution for everything. Even the lambda calculus requires that you feed it a starting series of "magical" integers to work. But functional is a useful way of thinking about programming, especially for library functions.
I would say the key difference between the functional style and imperative/procedural is not the presence of recursion but the lack of state. A functional function cannot have any internal state store, nor rely on anyone else having one. In other words, all of its arguments and values must be fully defined by parameters. This is a super-critical concept in debugging because it helps bulletproof your function.
Having said that, no real working program can be fully bulletproofed with the functional style because we need to hold onto state in real programs. (Is the user logged in?, etc.) We cannot pass these values in every single time and have a practical program.
I think merging these concepts of functional when you can and state when you must is the easiest approach. Certainly there are many functions in every program which are functional in style in that they do not contain or rely on any state, and those are good jumping-off points for starting to understand the functional style.
No, a program without effects is useless. Side effects, i.e. some action done on the side while evaluating the program are not required. There are other ways to treat effects in programs, particularly as values.
Effects, yes. Side effects are a particular form of effect. A pure functional language can compose an effectful value that is interpreted by a runtime, but no effect happens on the side as the program is evaluated.
> In computer science, an operation, function or expression is said to have a side effect if it modifies some state variable value(s) outside its local environment, that is to say has an observable effect besides returning a value (the intended effect) to the invoker of the operation.
GP is correct. There are zero side-effects inside a pure program. All the side-effects happen outside it, in a "runtime" (a better name IMO is "imperative shell") that exists totally separate from the program. The main() function of a pure program executes completely and terminates before any side effect has a chance to happen.
I put quotes around runtime because it's not a runtime like an interpreter in dynamic languages, or a library that you can call from inside your pure program. This runtime just calls your main() function, which return a complex value (it's a chain of lambdas, to spoil it) that is interpreted by this runtime or "imperative shell".
I understand this sounds unintuitive and might seem very confusing, but this is what makes useful pure programs possible. These couple presentations show how this type of boundary between imperative and functional code works with simpler type of program [1]. The only difference is that Haskell's "imperative shell" is lower-level than the presenter's. It only deals with IO, etc, whereas the presenter's imperative shell also has some domain code.
Yes! JS and TS allow this kind of functional style which I try to adhere to. There must be state, of course, but as few functions as possible should rely on it and certainly no function should "reach" into anywhere else to get a value. Those things have to be passed-in.
The change from AngularJS to Lit (or React), is an example of this kind of functional refactoring. AngularJS had two-way databinding (state!) and it attempted to pass that state upward when things changed. This made horrible spaghetti and impractical large apps.
Lit and React are only top-down. Yes, each component has state but only at the top. It gets passed-in as a parameter to other things, but they can't change it in return. This is much more modular and debuggable.
The biggest downside with doing it in something like JS is you don't have the same under-the-hood optimizations. In functional languages it's not actually going to allocate a whole new array each time an immutable list is appended to, but that's exactly what will happen in JavaScript. But yes I agree, these concepts are showing up everywhere, even if you don't do "FP."
At the end of the day, software always exceeds the ability of the hardware to run it. That's the cyclical nature of our business. Just for myself, I'd rather write to the easiest software methodology and wait a bit for compilers/transpilers/interpreters, etc to be fast enough that it doesn't matter what I write.
In other words, one can't really optimize for the top level (ease of use) and the bottom level (speed) at the same time.
Turing demonstrated that there are only two differences between any computers that have ever existed: how fast they are, and how difficult they are to program.
> In functional languages it's not actually going to allocate a whole new array each time an immutable list is appended to, but that's exactly what will happen in JavaScript.
Efficiency depends on how your js runtime is optimized. Elm works fine, for instance.
Yup, React is all functional these days, and pretty widespread. My team, for example, is "discovering" the benefits of functional approaches, and it's nice that it's a gentle slope.
Use of state is still widespread. `useState` is a function in the javascript-specification sense, but not in the FP sense, since its only purpose is a side effect, not the return value. I don't think react can do anything useful if you use only FP constructs.
It would be possible have a purely functional React if 1) the current state of the component were injected via an argument, and 2) instead of a setState call we just returned the state changes we needed.
With that our code would be 100% pure, and all the side-effect part would live outside our JSX files, similar to how Haskell does.
I think learning functional programming is harder with a statically-typed language as there's so much more to learn which revolves solely around the type system. I would recommend anyone new to FP to try Clojure first. No mon[a|oi]ds necessary. I also think the transition from procedural languages is easier than from OO languages. I was lucky not to be exposed to Java or C++ in the early days of my programming career, opting for Perl instead. When I transitioned to Ruby I also encountered Clojure at the same time and could appreciate the functional/lisp elements in the design of Ruby.
Mon[a|oi]ds are everywhere, but in some languages you just don't know about it. Which of course lets you not have to learn those concepts knowingly, but they're still there and you still could be a better developer for at least knowing they're there and they're behind some of the repeating patterns you see (string concatenation / promises / etc.)
I believe "not worrying about them at first" is actually a good path to learn these patterns. Using them first, some time later having a thought "oh hey, the API of how JSON decoders are written is kinda similar to how I'm generating random values, that's cool" and only later on learning that the it is in fact monads/monoids/functors/whatever and that they have laws and you can exploit that (eg. [repeated squaring for anything that's a semigroup](https://blog.jle.im/entry/shuffling-things-up.html)) and whatnot.
I actually think that FP programming and FP type systems are almost completely seperable and most of the FP jargon comes from FP type systems. Elixir is another example that makes FP programming very straightforward.
That being said I think once you get the basics of FP programming learning about FP type systems is worth it. Especially FP effect systems (i.e. IO monad).
I had only one FP experience with scala. I actually liked that it was statically typed. I have nothing to compare it to though.
But, higher order functions and type parameters are still a bit mind bending for me. I didn't have to write much code for those, but when I did it was really hard. I'm sure I'd need at least couple days of reading and playing around to somewhat grasp how to implement them again.
Well, as alluded to, mostly because it requires you to start over and relearn basic things. But the compiler devs for your language specifically setting out to break your program is an unusual hurdle. Based on that alone I would never touch Elm.
People building their apps on a discouraged "leaked" implementation detail (JS native/kernel modules) got cut off from using it.
The reason for disallowing that implementation detail wasn't "hey, somebody is using it, let's teach them a lesson" but, as far as I've heard, improvements to dead code elimination.
You can (and people, me included, do) use Elm in production peacefully. Huge apps, nontrivial JavaScript interop needed. You can do all that without depending on JS native modules.
I feel like whether you use a (discouraged) implementation detail of the language is a good indicator of whether you'll have a bad time later on when that implementation detail changes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As someone who is huge on Functional Programming, I'm not sure you're reaping the benefits you're talking about. Your dedication is impressive, but it's nowhere close to being required to build any kind of product.
Sure, I agree that learning FP will make you a better development, but spending all these learning resources in order to build a product is not very convenient.
I've been shipping code with mediocre languages all my life. Even now, I routinely pick node.js over Haskell or Rust just because the complexity of the solution I need to build is not high enough to justify writing amazing bug-free code. Sure, you may get more bugs and less help from the compiler, but there is more material online and I can easily find a cheap developer to throw at the project.
I've been developing for 15 years. After 5 years of C++, PHP, JS, I decided to jump into Haskell for my side projects. I can't say the learning curve was as hard as you made it out to be: there are plenty of great resources for learning Haskell and you don't need to go through Elm or Purescript (which weren't even a thing when I learnt Haskell). Actually the differences between the languages may make things more confusing.
In the last couple of years I stopped using Haskell completely, simply because Rust (a language designed to build things, unlike Haskell which is more of a language research project) is functional enough, pleasant enough to use and is developing a nice community.
The most useful FP concepts trickled down in other languages.
It's not functional programming, it's functional languages that go bat shit crazy with the amount of symbols they use that'd make looking at heliographs a refreshing pass time.
In a LISP, the parenthesis are structural syntax. Where other languages use curly braces, whitespace, square-brackets, and usually a combination thereof; LISP simply uses parenthesis.
In Lisp parentheses are used as a syntax for nested lists. Lisp programs then are written on top of that with a syntax, which is structural on top of lists. Most other languages don't use a primitive data structure for encoding programs (other than text).
We're talking about typed FP so only SML in your list really counts. So let's see: functors, polymorphism, higher-kinded types (does SML have those?), Hindley-Milner type inference, etc. Then for Haskell (the main topic of the linked article), bring in a bunch of unfamiliar algebra such as the notorious monoid on the category of endofunctors. It is actually worth understanding that. I liked this article (prerequisite: some exposure to Haskell):
There's not really an official definition of FP. There are some proposed ones that involve types and some that don't involve them. Mainly though, this is a thread about the linked article, which is about the tribulations that the author had learning Haskell. Most of those tribulations were with the type system and I think that matches most people's experience. You can't transplant it to Lisp.
That’s the way we ought to be working. If you don’t write the DSL, you’ll have to macro-expand the DSL in your head and write a bunch of boilerplate which everyone will be forced to try to reread and maintain forever.
You can write a DSL using words rather than symbols, and IME that makes programming a lot easier - you give up very little density and in return you can discuss your code aloud, search for it, ...
Functional programming seems to be extremely easy if you have never learned imperative programming first. I have seen beginners grasp FP much faster than OOP and write production ready code only after a few weeks/months of learning whereas beginners need on average multiple years to learn "production ready" design pattern style OOP.
On the other hand I have observed some of the best OOP developers really struggle with FP. It's not that they find FP hard to learn, they find it really hard to unlearn OOP and the thinking that the way things are done in OOP is the holy grail of good software design.
For example, only recently there was this blog post trending on HN (Am I stuck in a local maximum - https://blog.ploeh.dk/2021/08/09/am-i-stuck-in-a-local-maxim...), which was triggered by a "blue tick" OOP programmer (tastapod on Twitter - inventor of BDD) making false statements about FP because he seemingly struggled learning it and wasn't able to work out how to program without mutations. He came to the conclusion that all functional programmers actually use mutations by default and immutable data structures are not common in FP at all. It was a completely unfounded assertion and clearly one made from frustration by someone who was so hard wired into OOP programming that they couldn't adapt to the FP way of thinking. It was a prime example of an "old dog" (citing the original article) finding FP harder than the new guys.
Yes, this is very true. It took me a lot of time 'unlearn' bad habits about state and side effects before functional programming really clicked. The interesting bit is that it made my other programs better as well, because I still find myself avoiding mutable state and impure functions.
I'd personally say it's less about unlearning statefulness and learning what the alternative tools are and not be bullheaded and kick and scream about not having the tools one is used to, e.g. map and reduce vs for and while.
Once you learn how to use them, their utility and benefit (they explicitly limit the scope of the changes in the loop and reduce mental overhead) become clear. But a lot of people never get past "why can't I have a for loop" and don't get there.
Map and reduce immediately clicked, the state thing had me for the longest time ('how do you generate output, how do you get a real world effect from a function'), those seemed to me to be far more magical in the FP world than in the step-by-step alteration of the environment that I was used to from imperative programming.
It also seemed to map harder onto the real world than IP, where instructions about piecemeal alterations seem to be the way of the world.
It really clicked for me when I started to think in terms of transformations, where each function performs a transformation of the input on the way to some output. This allows you to be 'pure' most of the way and to limit input and output to the top layers of the program, where they should be (should in my opinion).
Thre's a little bit of psychological esoterism too, fp is very minimal, OOP gives people some new mystery rope to hang themselves with. verbose syntax, procedures to follow, it's probably psychologically a better impedance matching than 'a -> 'a -> b -> ('a -> 'b) where people have to hold very very evanescent ideas floating in the air without as much ways to play with them.
It's "monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors": if you don't understand something, here is an explanation in terms of other things you understand even less.
Imagine you have this pipeline that already works for data.csv. But now you have data2.csv which has some difference (e.g., some values are null, while the original data.csv had no null values).
Monads are an approach to making the existing pipeline work (with minimal changes) while still being able to handle both data.csv and data2.csv. The minimal changes follow a strict rule as follows (this is not a valid shell command anymore):
In other words, only two kinds of changes are allowed:
- You can bring in a wrap function, that modifies the entries of the given csv data.
- You can bring in a new kind of pipe ']' instead of '|'
The idea being, the wrap function takes in original data stream, and for each "unit" (a line in the csv file, called a value) produces a new kind of data-unit (called monadic-value). Then your new pipe ']' has some additional functionality that is aware of the new kind of data-unit and is able to, e.g., process the null values, while leaving the non-null values unchanged.
Note, you didn't have to modify any of the process-1 through process-n commands.
BTW, the null value handling monad is called the 'maybe monad' (and of course there are other kinds of monads).
If you make the existing pipeline work in this way, you essentially created a monad to solve your problem (monad here is the new mechanism consisting of the new value, and the two new changes, the wrap function, and the new pipe).
edit: There may be a need to also modify the '>' mechanism. But I think that is not essential to the idea of a monad, since you could replace ">" with "] process-n+1 >" (i.e., you created a new outermost function 'process-n+1' that simply converts the monadic-values back to regular values).
edit 2: If instead of handling null-values, the purpose is to "create side-effects" e.g., at every pipe invocation, dump all/some contents of the data into a log file, then the kind of monad you end up creating would be something like an "I/O monad".
Try this instead, simply put monads are used to provide an easier to use API to some black box abstraction. Example monads can include a "List" or a "Class"
Why does Haskell etc need this? because its hard for them to make an easier to use API to access the internals of some abstraction due to the strict type system unless they use the monad pattern. In comparison in untyped FP everything is transparent while OOP allows you to create your own API within the abstraction itself.
Funnily enough from this thread you can see all sorts of wrong ideas about Monads that beginner Haskellers have
it doesn't make sense to an imperative programmer because "sequence computations" is like water to a fish. the idea that computation isn't always sequenced doesn't occur to someone who hasn't encountered functional programming.
Not sure what you mean by that. Threaded and event-driven systems don’t necessarily have a predictable sequence. Same with data flow through any non-trivial web application using background processing.
I’ve worked on systems that run through a chain of background workers. Each job had a complete list of operations (one per worker) to preform. When each worker finished, it posted the job back to the general queue with the new state and one less operation to preform.
All programs are eventually sequenced. You can’t work on data that doesn’t exist yet.
I’m pretty sure I don’t lack the ability to understand what your talking about. I am sure I don’t know what the words you are using mean.
As an educator, I get to see many young programmers learn about functional programming usually around their sophomore year of college. They've never used threaded, event-driven, dataflow, or similar systems. All they know how to write are single-threaded Java programs, and their perception is that programs are "a list of statements that tell a computer what to do, in order".
They are especially uneasy about the concept of lazy evaluation. It goes against everything they know about programming - that you write a line of code, it's executed, and you move on to the next line of code. With lazy evaluation (as in Haskell) it's an uphill battle getting them comfortable with the idea of writing a line of code that will be executed at some unspecified point in the future. For many students, this can be a mind-bending realization.
Let me just explain to you what functional programming is at a high level and I'll get a little bit into the monad. Maybe that will help you understand.
IF you can compress all your javascript into one line of code or as close to it as much as possible then you are absolutely doing functional programming.
That is essentially what functional programming is, how to program so everything goes on one line. You can think of it as expression based programming, or how to compress your entire program into a single expression!
Now, when you see multiline functional code, what's actually happening is that the programmer is giving parts of his expression a name and placing it on another line so that the code is more readable or the programmer could be generalizing logic in the expression for reuse in other places. Example:
That's it! Turns out that doing this type of organization is EXACTLY the same as doing procedural programming with one extra property! Keeping everything immutable! So if you program in javascript and you keep everything immutable you are doing the exact same thing as compressing all your code onto a single line!
Now that being said there's a lot of this going on in functional programming:
The above is literally the same thing as operator overloading you just define the operator to be:
f | y = function(x) => f(y(x))
and you use it as such:
( f | a | b | x )(x)
like bash kinda.
This type of thing is called function composition!
A monad is just a special type of composition Not only do I want to compose all the functions but at each step of the composition I want to do an extra thing! So let's say I want to log the output
So I define
f | y = (x) => {
result = y(x)
print(result)
return f(result)
}
Then when I compose:
( f | a | b | x )(x)
It will print out each intermediary value along the pipeline!
That is essentially one type of monad. A monad is a way to compose functions such that they do an extra thing! And this intuition probably takes you 85% of the way there on how to use monads in haskell. Monads in haskell just have some extra rules but the intuition is 100% the same thing.
Now you will note that I cheated for f | y. I wrote the code on multiple lines! That is exactly what "sequential" code is!
It is the fundamental property of reality that is at odds with functional programming. Haskell is trying to get rid code that requires you to write things on multiple lines! It is trying to abstract all of that away with a bunch of crazy abstractions so all your code can fit beautifully onto a single line! It is in fact impossible to write the multi line code I wrote above in haskell. What haskell does is present to you the IO monad as an API so you print things through composition and you never have to write "sequential" lines of code.
Turns out when you do single line coding a whole class of errors disappears and your code is also far more modular. It's hard to convince you of the benefits with just words. If you want to know more, you have to walk the path, I can only show you the way.
One more thing. When code is written this way the compiler can do much more tricks with it. Because state is immutable the compiler can execute code in a different order to achieve the same result as your intention. You don't have to often think about this when programming in haskell but it does allow you to do certain tricks.
Mainly because we are monkeys to whom a reasonably accurate reductive analysis can be applied if we label the axes "asshole" and "idiot".
It was a good blog post by a reasonably intelligent monkey who seemed to score low on the "idiot" axis. But some other monkey pegged the "asshole" axis by preventing us from highlighting the text so we could right-click and search to answer the primary question, "What is it?"
Namely, what is functional programming? Even after besting the right-click hurdle, no one easy and succinct answer is available.
The meta-analysis of this blog post therefore circles back around to perform a second-phase adjustment of the author's "idiot" score once we realize that he has done exactly what he is complaining about; he is a bad teacher because he did not answer the "What is it?" question.
He seems like a reasonably nice person, so I think we have to leave his "asshole" score alone in the second phase.
The collective effort, however, scores high on both the "idiot" and "asshole" axes, and this is the core of the "bad teacher" problem.
I spent most of my long university career angry about this problem. Why is is that monkeys can't teach?
Partly, it is because they are arrogant assholes who don't want to weaken their position by making it easy for others to access their expertise.
And partly it is because they are monkeys who think more highly of themselves than is justified, and therefore they cover their ignorance with jargon, hand-waving, and obfuscation.
Other than extinction, I'm not sure how to solve the problem, but I'm sure that the first step is by starting every lesson by answering the "What is it?" question succinctly and concretely, and, more importantly, realizing that if you can't do that, you should shut the fuck up and go away.
To your point about others not teaching well to preserve their status, I'm sure it exists but not that prevalent. I think people who have known something for a long time just forget how to empathize with not understanding what they've known for so long.
For this reason alone I think this is why fellow students tend to be much better at tutoring/helping each other instead of their professors.
Probably because every single FP tutorial is very far away from real tasks that average software developer deals on everyday basis.
They describe pure functions and categories of endofunctors, while I have tasks like "invoke this stateful external API if that stateful external API returns specific values".
Personally I think it is a matter of what teacher one happens to bump into.
I was quite lucky to have such set of teachers for logic programming (Tarsis World and Prolog), and Functional Programming (Lisp, Miranda, Caml Light).
It felt no different form other programming classes.
In fact, it had higher success grades than thermodynamics, electromagnetism physics or the most feared of all assignments, data structures and algorithms.
So dammed hard depends very much on the learning path.
Because you're already used to a very different approach to express the solution to a problem. It is like somebody who already knows an western language trying to suddenly learn Mandarin.
Hah, I was pondering how to write a longer comment expressing this same thing so I'll piggyback on yours.
Paradigms are modes of thinking. You can't just pick up a new paradigm on the fly when you've spent your entire life in another one. Some individuals are exceptions, but most of us aren't so lucky as to have such a natural aptitude for changing our minds on the fly.
In order to be introduced to a new paradigm you have a couple options:
1. Sink or swim. In Haskell, this is the monad tutorial. Why the hell do people start their instruction here? Did they start here? If they did, did they succeed from that point or did they have to find another path and just forgot that this was a really stupid way to start?
2. Baby steps. "See Spot. See Spot run. Run Spot, run!" Learning Italian (previously Spanish), this is literally the level I'm at (actually, a bit better, but still highly constrained by my limited vocabulary). In Haskell, this is:
double :: Int -> Int
double x = 2 * x
quadruple :: Int -> Int
quadruple x = double (double x)
Simple functions tested in the REPL. Then you teach them about function composition (drawing on their knowledge from mathematics, where it's the same idea and not merely an analogous idea) and make a point-free version of quadruple. Then you show how functions can be passed around so that you can do:
square_function f = f . f
quadruple = square_function double
Maybe give that first function a better name, my coffee hasn't kicked in yet. My point, though, is that functional programming in Haskell does not rely on monads when teaching the topic. There are a million things to teach before you even reach that point, and only once the student has a foundation in Haskell's syntax, base semantics, and type system do they need to be introduced to monads. At which point it'll make a lot more sense because they'll be able to grok what monads add to the language.
By analogy (hah!), we don't start C language learners with implementing a generic swap or sort function. That would be way beyond their initial capability, relying no too many ideas that they have no foundation for (that said, it's a shorter path to that in C than monads in Haskell).
So why do people think that learning a totally novel (to them) paradigm like functional programming, especially in the uber-FP language Haskell, can be done by starting at the deep end without studying its fundamentals?
I equate it to a skier learning to snowboard. A skier points their toes downhill to go down the mountain; a snowboarder points their toes perpendicular. Once you are used to pointing your toes downhill, its very hard for the mind to switch context to perpendicular because your mind is telling you that's how you stop.
I think it's important to take note that these issues arise from typed functional programming languages. Untyped functional programming languages aka dynamic FP languages avoid most of these problems entirely by having robust and useful metaprogramming features, whereas in languages like Haskell, most experiences Haskellers would tell you to avoid Template Haskell like the plague.
Just to give you a sense of the issue in typed FP, and I will take Haskell as the prime example, the average Haskeller will not be able what a Monad is beyond the standard definition in category theory. I tried it once, got the whole Slack channel explode as everyone tries to tell me "I will just get it".
This is the result of my study.
https://medium.com/glassblade/pragmatic-monad-understanding-...
IMO the main problem is that typed FP langs don't try to connect their abstractions to the mainstream languages when these abstractions clearly have some counterpart or an intuitive close cousin in typed OOP. Worse, these abstractions usually are gaping holes in the language design but the typed FP community thinks its a feature.
Monads allow you to compose functions with incompatible in/out types. That’s all it is. And (as a nice bonus) add extra code in-between the two functions you are joining. It opens up a huge number of cool things you can do.
These uncommon FP frameworks and languages can be good tools in the right, experienced hands. They can also be fun for side projects and as learning exercises. But every time I’ve watched programmers try to use uncommon functional languages for real projects they end up like this article:
> More accurately, learning Functional Programming concepts used in Haskell in 3 months after having thrown out 30,000 lines of code on a project that was now monumentally behind schedule was the hardest thing I had to do in my career.
When you’ve reached the point of being severely behind schedule, throwing out mountains of code along the way, and struggling mightily just to get basic things accomplished: It’s time to stop. Don’t double down on a new language that you also have to learn from scratch. Pick something tried and true and get the work done. Revisit the functional language at a later time for an unimportant project or a side project, not something with a deadline.
If the programming language or ideology has become more important than shipping the project, we’ve lost the point.