[deltasevennine]

You did argue for everything is the same. Basically by "same" I mean everything is "equally good" depending on context. The whole hammers are for hammering and screwdrivers are for screwing thing... I explicitly said your argument was that everything was a tool in a toolbox and you exactly replicated what I said.

My point is: something can be truly bad and something can be truly good EVEN when considering all possible contexts.

You can't prove definitively whether this is the case for FP or OOP or any programming style for that matter. You can't know whether someones "side" is a cargo cult or not when there's no theoretical way for measuring this.

The cultish following may even be correct in the same way I cargo cult my belief that the world is ROUND and not flat.

[still_grokking]

> My point is: something can be truly bad and something can be truly good EVEN when considering all possible contexts.

No, that's impossible. "Truly good" or "truly bad" are moral categories. Something closely related to religion, BTW…

> You can't know whether someones "side" is a cargo cult […]

Of course I can.

If it objectively makes no sense (in some context), and is only blindly copied from somewhere else without understanding why there things were done the way they were done, this is called "cargo cult". That's the definition of this term.

How can I tell whether there is no understanding behind something? If the cultists would understand what they are actually copying they wouldn't copy it at all. ;-)

Replacing methods with free standing functions is for example on of such things: In Haskell there are no methods. So free standing functions are all you have. But imitating this style in a language with methods makes no sense at all! It complicates things for no reason. This is obviously something where someone does not understand why Haskell is like it is. They just copy on the syntax level something that they think is "functional programming". But surface syntax should not be missed for the actual concepts! Even it's easy to copy the syntax instead of actually adapting the ideas behind it (only where it makes sense of course!).

[deltasevennine]

>No, that's impossible. "Truly good" or "truly bad" are moral categories. Something closely related to religion, BTW…

Wrong. Good and bad is used in a fuzzy way here, I'm OBVIOUSLY not talking about morality OR religion. What I am talking about are things that can be potentially quantified to a formal theory. For example we know the shortest distance between two points is a line. We have formalized algorithmic speed with computational complexity theory. O(N) is definitively more "good" then O(N^2).

Right now we don't have optimization theory or formal definitions on logic organization. We can't quantify it so we resort to opinionated stuff. And the whole thing goes in circles. But that is not to say this is impossible to formalize. We just haven't yet so all arguments go nowhere. But the shortest distance between two points? Nobody argues about that (I hope some pedantic person doesn't bring up non-euclidean geometry because come on).

All we can say right now is because there is no theory, nothing definitive can be said.

>Of course I can. >If it objectively makes no sense (in some context), and is only blindly copied from somewhere else without understanding why there things were done the way they were done, this is called "cargo cult". That's the definition of this term.

You can't. The definition of bias is that the person who is biased is unaware of it. You can talk with every single religious person in the world. They all think they arrived at their beliefs logically. Almost everyone thinks the way they interpret the world is logical and consistent and it makes sense. They assume everyone else is wrong.

To be truly unbiased is to recognize the possibility of your own fallibility. To assume that your point of view is objective is bias in itself. You ask those people who "blindly" copy things if they did it blindly, they will tell you "No." They think they're conclusions are logical they don't think they're blind. The same way you don't think your blind, the same way I don't think I'm blind. All blind people point at other blind people and say everyone else is blind except for them.

The truly unbiased person recognizes the possibility of their own blindness. But almost nobody thinks this way.

Nobody truly knows who is blind and who is not. So they argue endlessly and present factoids to each other like this one here you just threw at me:

"Replacing methods with free standing functions is for example on of such things: In Haskell there are no methods. So free standing functions are all you have. But imitating this style in a language with methods makes no sense at all! It complicates things for no reason. This is obviously something where someone does not understand why Haskell is like it is. They just copy on the syntax level something that they think is "functional programming". But surface syntax should not be missed for the actual concepts! Even it's easy to copy the syntax instead of actually adapting the ideas behind it (only where it makes sense of course!)."

I mean how do you want me to respond to this factoid? I'll throw out another factoid:

Forcing people to use methods complicates things for no reason. Why not just have state and logic separated? Why force everything into some horrible combination? If I want to use my method in another place I have to bring all the state along with it. I can't move my logic anywhere because it's tied to the contextual state. The style of the program itself is a weakness and that's why people imitate another style.

And boom. What are you gonna do? Obviously throw another factoid at me. We can pelt each other with factoids and the needle doesn't move forward at all.

[hutzlibu]

"You did argue for everything is the same."

I do not see where he did that. He argued simply that context matters. (And yes a "bad" tool can be the right tool, if it is the only tool avaiable.)

"My point is: something can be truly bad and something can be truly good EVEN when considering all possible contexts."

And diving deeper into philosophy here, can you name one example?

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

Not deltasevennine, but giving the CPU fewer things to do sounds good to me (in any context), even if it is currently unpopular. Some cults are popular and some aren't.

[deltasevennine]

>I do not see where he did that. He argued simply that context matters. (And yes a "bad" tool can be the right tool, if it is the only tool avaiable.)

Well I see it. If you don't see it, I urge you to reread what he said.

A bad tool can be the right tool but some tools are so bad that it is never the right tool.

>And diving deeper into philosophy here, can you name one example?

Running is better then walking for short distances when optimizing for shorter time. In this case walking is definitively "bad." No argument by anyone.

Please don't take this into a pedantic segway with your counter here.