[haleudo]

I completely agree. That functional style actually favors readability and maintainability is a quite strong claim which I read often but it's usually lacking evidence.

In my experience, software engineers "think" imperatively. First do this, then do that. That's what we do in everyday life (open a random cooking book..) and that's also what the CPU does, modulo some out-of-order and pipelining tricks. A declarative style adds some extra cognitive load upfront. With training you may get oblivious to that, but in the end of the day, the machine does one thing after the other, and the software engineer wants to make it do that. So, either you express that more "directly" in an imperative style, or try to come up with a declarative style which may or may not be more elegant, but that this ends up more readable or maintainable is on the functional proponents to prove.

[dropofwill]

Maybe we have different mental models and that’s what drives this conflict? I certainly wouldn’t say that first do this then do that is my primary mental model, in small blocks yes, but once you get past even 1 file that breaks down. Once you introduce threads or the network these assumptions have to go out the window anyways.

It’s funny you mention recipes, because i’ve always been frustrated by traditional recipe descriptions that muddle concurrency and make it difficult to conceptualize the whole process. E.g. the table structure here is superior to step by step http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/158/Dark-Chocolate...

[haleudo]

The network is the prime example for forcing serialization of events.

Tbf, I agree with the recipe criticism. Would be neat with a dependency graph instead of a step-by-step list of things to do when baking a cake. Would have saved me a lot of headache in the past. (The table in your link expresses a tree, which is probably sufficient for most purposes.)

[ahf8Aithaex7Nai]

> In my experience, software engineers "think" imperatively

I hear this often. In the past the claim used to be that they "think" object-oriented. This is a thinly veiled argumentum ad naturam.

> ... on the functional proponents to prove

Prove your own claims before you demand proofs from other people. And by prove I mean really rigorous thinking, not just superficially seeking confirmation for the things you already believe either way.

[AnimalMuppet]

Not necessarily. If the current "default" is imperative, then the burden of proof is on the functional advocates, because they're the ones advocating for change.

[haleudo]

A: This thing! It's true!

B: Prove it!

A: No, you prove first! With really rigorous thinking, please!

[kaba0]

I mean, OOP is still a very great model for plenty of programs.

[hgsgm]

In my experience, people think and explain their ideas in natural language and sometimes pictures. So that is the best way to program computers.

[kaba0]

Imperative is good (perhaps even better) on a local, small scope.

It is terrible on a system level with concurrent execution, there you really need all the safe guards.