This is a problem that extends far beyond “esoteric language of choice”. It’s the challenge of being a nerd in a boring business world.
What attracts people to being a programmer? For some people it’s “looks like a reasonable job with good pay and conditions”. For others, it’s more “I love computers, programming, and abstract puzzles to solve”. This latter group (of which I am one), is more likely to provide both benefits and problems.
The benefit is they will generally be capable of greater innovation than the former group, but the downside is that they may just focus on interesting puzzles and ignore the needs of the (boring) business. Choosing an exotic language will greatly tilt the ratios towards this later group.
Most people in this later group can discipline themselves to focus on delivery, while remaining a great resource when truely challenging puzzles pop up. Most, but not all. Choosing a very esoteric language is pushing the curve far towards this tail, and the result will be many “brilliant, but useless to our business, people”.
Every small business needs a strong technical leader. I’m convinced of this. You need someone in charge that can stop the arguments, make people put down their toys, and remove people that cannot contribute for whatever reason. So this is my conclusion, it’s boring like so much of business. You need the right manager.
It’s a spectrum, it’s multidimensional and it changes over time though.
I love myself computers and probably more so earlier in my career than now, but I also like influencing people (often through code, with a focus less on algorithmic elegance but instead more on setting patterns, tooling, and APIs that influence how others build around them); and I also enjoy the challenge of aligning the pleasure of a juicy piece of elegant code against the pleasure of positive business outcomes. I think that makes me neither a “boring business person” nor a diehard code nerd, but somewhere at the intersection with attributes in other directions not captured by either stereotype.
That said, if you really are 100% motivated by abstract technical challenges, then maybe academia is more for you than industry is. Or working at the small slice of companies that truly make their bread and butter on cutting edge technical excellence and not, say, applying tried and true tools to some underserved niche.
I do find the “algorithm nerd” charisma also tends to intersect with having warped views of how the world operates and weak self-awareness, so maybe easier said than personally realized.
> What attracts people to being a programmer? For some people it’s “looks like a reasonable job with good pay and conditions”. For others, it’s more “I love computers, programming, and abstract puzzles to solve”. This latter group (of which I am one), is more likely to provide both benefits and problems.
> The benefit is they will generally be capable of greater innovation than the former group, but the downside is that they may just focus on interesting puzzles and ignore the needs of the (boring) business.
I think the problem rather is that many "business people" have a deep hate against people who love to think about whether there is a deeper hidden mathematical structure behind the business problems. Just to be clear: there also exist some few business people who appreciate this, but the latter are typically "nerds" who mostly switched to business because it pays much better.
It's not my experience that the latter group of programmers ignores the business problems, they just rather have their own much less anti-intellectual way of approaching them.
I can't plus this enough. I hired a unicorn business minded, brilliant, can solve any software engineering or UI/UX problem engineer who happened to have a predilection for functional programming.
The problem, as posed, seems to be "when you hire $LANG devs, all they want to do is write $LANG, even when $LANG is poorly suited to solving the problem at hand".
To me, this doesn't seem to be a problem unique to functional programming languages. You'd have this problem when choosing any language outside the mainstream, I think.
From the article:
> Then, one thing leads to another, and you're knee deep in learning about homotopy type theory or continuations or whatever. Meanwhile, you're a week behind on that Jira ticket for issuing JSON Web Tokens because there's no actively maintained JWT libraries for Gooby.
You wouldn't have this problem in the first place if the language you chose -did- have an actively maintained JWT library.
Like, a company that chooses Haskell is a lot more likely to run into this problem than a company that chooses Clojure, due to the simple fact that Clojure can use Java libraries, whereas Haskell exists within its own isolated ecosystem. So, between the two, the likelihood is generally lower that you will, in the first place, run into a problem that Clojure can't easily solve.
So, in my mind, this essentially boils down to the same sort of risk/reward assessment you always need to make when choosing any language for any project.
As with everything, there’s some truth to that, but also C#’s json parsing libs are sub-par… and that’s really the least that a modern language should do well
I don't see why anyone should be a $LANG dev. All programming languages suck (there is this theoretical language that doesn't suck, but it isn't invented yet). Surely $LANG devs recognize that their language sucks, right?
And that's why we switch languages constantly. For some problems, some languages suck a little less.
> You wouldn't have this problem in the first place if the language you chose -did- have an actively maintained JWT library.
Actively maintained does not mean it’s good. We have to read and fork all libs we use (regulatory) so it won’t end up getting hacked etc, at least, less likely and a lot of ‘actively maintained libraries’ especially npms/pips are total garbage. We often spend less time just rolling ourselves than figuring out if this unreadable, overarchitected resume driven garbage even works.
I work at a place that has ancestral Gooby code. It is truly horrific and an affront to whatever machine god (GPT-X?) may judge us in the future. The badness has literally nothing to do with the language. All the bad parts are due to the original team having reached for the most esoteric thing available at the time. I like playing with weird tech shit but there is a time and a place, and that place is not in prod for a startup.
They way overspent their strangeness budget[0] at every step of the stack. Even though I love (this) Gooby in general, in this case it has caused extreme damage to the organization.
I am still angry at the original devs for their choices because they basically poisoned the whole org against the language even though it would be useful for the org as a whole to adopt it in a non psychotic manner. It basically resulted in a reflexive ban for all Gooby in the future even when it might make sense.
I've personally seen this, it can be pure goddamn cancer.
The company hired a very smart charlatan and he convinced them to start a greenfield project in Haskell. Then they need to hire Haskell developers for this specific thing because everyone else only knows Java and Python. Nearly a year later they're barely getting started, but it's getting hyped like you couldn't believe. A lot of sprint planning time starts to become 'how do we start integrating [New thing]' because the Directors have been fluffing it so hard.
Anyway it never got used in prod. The development turned into a disaster and the original guy quit. The team got dismantled and the whole thing got memory-holed. Anyone in the org hearing the word "Haskell" would invariably just think about it lol
This is just a hiring problem, not related to functional programming. I agree with the basic premise of the article however: depending on the financial condition of the company, hiring people who are overly attached to or obsessed with a single technology probably isn't a good idea. But that's of course not exclusive to functional programming. Right now you will find plenty of people obsessed with Rust (not a functional language) who don't care about the business goals and only want to write Rust. A few years ago it was Go. Before that it was Node.js. A few more years ago it was Ruby on Rails.
This - I’ve had this same experience in both the FP, middle ground (Kotlin, Scala, etc.) and Rust space. It’s not FP, it’s that some engineers are interested in business goals and others are interested in conceptual goals. Those who are interested in conceptual goals gravitate towards conceptually interesting paradigms. Those who are interested in business goals gravitate towards business goals. It’s not mutually exclusive; I’ve met Scala and Rust obsessed engineers who also deliver; and Java engineers who can’t see past the next AbstractProxyFactory. But if I were forced to stereotype, new paradigms come with people who are more interested in the concepts than the goal (yes, I know FP isn’t new, blah blah, professionally speaking…)
While there’s some truth to “there are programmers obsessed with every language”, functional programming encourages a higher level of correctness, and this can lead to over-analysis and premature optimization if one is not careful. Yes, the additional correctness can be a real benefit, but only if the correctness is correct, and that really depends on the business. If the business comes back every week with “you know, actually we want…” you didn’t get a lot of benefits from the extra analysis.
Couple that with other challenges of running a niche stack in production and it can be quite a burden. Experienced, pragmatic developers will have techniques for managing this even in a functional language, but again, pragmatic may require compromise that doesn’t sit well with the purist.
Not sure if this was a deliberate bait to demonstrate the problem, but Rust is a functional language in the modern sense (it has most of ML's features).
Hiring open source rockstars is problematic, so is hiring resume-driven trend-chasers.
But I think that author is missing at least one more category: senior engineers that worked in multiple programming languages over their career, who can see how design of Gooby and values of it's community create a better programming environment.
Indeed. Category 3 seems to be about developers who insist on using Gooby regardless of whether or not it’s a reasonable choice for solving the current problem. What about developers who simply have Gooby as one tool in their toolbox, know how to use it, and enjoy doing so when an appropriate opportunity arises?
I once wrote some Haskell professionally. It was a successor to a previous generation of the application that I had written in Python and maintained for several years. Using Haskell was my choice and it was made because some of Haskell’s strengths would address specific pain points learned from that experience. Meanwhile, everything else I wrote for that client was still being done in mainstream languages for mainstream reasons and there was never any suggestion that we would rewrite anything else in Haskell or adopt it by default for any new work, so I think this situation is clearly distinct from category 3 in the article.
At this point pretty much any language you want to pick for me is a couple weeks’ ramp up time. I couldn’t really care less.
What’s the right language? Probably the language you’re already using for the rest of your stuff so we can interface with the rest of the org efficiently.
Is it new? Grab whatever the industry standard is for your segment. Lots of libs, lots of mindshare, easy to hire, get it done.
I do get caught in HR filters a lot without a bunch of projects in gooby though.
> The multi-armed bandit is a really interesting problem in mathematical optimization... This problem is so interesting, in fact, that during World War II the Allies proposed air dropping copies of the original paper over Germany. The end result, or so it was theorized, was that German scientists would be so fascinated and distracted by the problem that they would abandon the war effort and cripple any German military research projects in the process.
Sounds like an impractical (and ineffective) idea that was never implemented, so not actually all that incredible. Rather boring, inconsequential anecdote that adds nothing to the discussion.
The classic story is how pg created a storefront in lisp that he sold to yahoo. Yahoo couldn't hire lisp programmers and rewrote it in another language (c++?) and it wasn't as good. But the decision still made sense from a business perspective.
And this article sadly shows why. Objectively, they aren't fair to "Goody engineers". Often, they mean opinionated engineers. Now opinionated engineers can be good and bad for profits - they work hard and point maybe good direction and maybe bad directions. But they make the company harder to sell and that objectively reduces the stock price and so it's bad from the "economic standpoint" even if it makes profits somewhat higher.
The problem is not with opinionated engineers. (Almost every engineer I know is opinionated; the ones who are not tend not to be very good.) The problem is with engineers who are excessively opinionated about the wrong things. Having opinions about the product is way more valuable than being obsessed with writing the umpteenth JSON parsing library in Gooby because the others aren’t built exactly the way you’d build it.
Sometimes just using the language the majority of folks enjoy working in is fine.
You get programming astronauts in every language. There’s nothing special about Gooby or functional programmers that makes them deficient in the ways described. You could easily replace Gooby with Rust, Lisp, Python, C++, C#, Java, JS.
What makes the functional programming astronauts stand out is pure optics. If you’re tolerant of C++ templates or Python’s metaclasses you might view discussions on Profunctors to sound like gibberish. If you’re not someone who even uses those tools at all and avoid them out of principal it can sound like a plot for a hostile takeover. To an experienced Haskell programmer it’s likely to be fairly banal.
Which kind of blows this whole theory that Gooby programmers are the problem.
The real problem are those who seek to use a hammer regardless of what problem they’re trying to solve. I’m certain anyone whose been around for a while had encountered the “patterns astronaut,” who will view every problem as an opportunity to figure out how to apply as many GoF patterns as possible. These are the misguided souls we need to bring back into the fold.
In 2005, I needed to hire a Haskell dev with deep NLP expertise to replace
a member of my startup team.
After a posting on the Haskell mailing list, zero responses came back.
We realized the world had about 3 people that matched all the requirements:
one was the dev that needed to be replaced, the other one was a tenured
professor of a U.S. university (Hi, Hal!), and there was one more,
whom I don't remember but it may just as well have been Simon Peyton-Jones himself (only slightly exaggerating here).
In the end, I forced a complete re-write in Java of our initial "rapidly prototyped" Haskell codebase at the time, and I often wonder what I would do nowadays, nearly 20 years later (Python is slow, has the commercial disadvantage of letting customers read off your secret sauce if code runs on their machines, but has a good dev pool to hire from, and definitely is both high-level enough as well as suitable regarding library support; ironically, Java is still a contender, despite the boilerplate Kotlin isn't getting the traction that Rust is getting against C, C++ has changed dramatically every 5 years in the 20 years since, and still ads complexity, which is all very scary, and Julia has a small talent pool, and isn't ready for prime time yet, certainly not regarding NLP libraries).
I know, since this is HN, people will say "LISP!", but I'm not sure; I always
loved the aestetics of Scheme, but not the ergonomics - and my conjecture is there might be something about keywords that makes them superior cognitively for humans compared to just piles of nested parentheses.
When you have one expert in something, you'll need to back them up or replace them in the future. You're job is to find three or four people that are decent at thing, and then put them all on expert tasks, as a team, so they grow into experts. This also frees up your expert to do that level or higher work.
I'm always surprised when I see this approach to hiring. I have a lot of Haskell in the codebase at my current company. It hrs never occured to me to try to hire from the "Haskell community" we always hire from our product community because tech is easier to teach than product.
> and my conjecture is there might be something about keywords that makes them superior cognitively for humans compared to just piles of nested parentheses.
It's the nature of the language and the VM that it runs in. The code is data and data is code. You can construct a list and then decide to evaluate it. Or the current code you're writing is actually data for another piece of code. It's a paradigm that really opens the computation mindset.
The VM looks like the common REPL you see in Python, but it's more powerful. It's more like a OS installation than a language interpreter. You can inspect anything, patch anything. When paired with an editor, that means you can only apply part of the code and then rerun part of the code. You can also try stuff and then formalize stuff down in code, no need to rerun the whole program.
For me, the parenthesis are the same as Python's whitespaces and colons. Or C-like language and their brackets and semicolons. Just syntax. After a while, you just don't notice them other than check that the expression is correct.
Is this written from a different time line were TypeScript doesn't exist?
I have a long history of doing FP in a bunch of the traditional FP languages (Scheme/Haskell/etc). Ended up working at a young startup with equally young employees awhile back and was sort of surprised to see that the long heralded fantasy of cranky FP enthusiasts has, for better or worse, come true in Type Script.
I saw a generation of new programmers truly doing type-driven development and using a range of functional programming techniques without them even realizing that this was a big thing. Funnily enough they were terrified of anything resembling object oriented programming. If the word "class" appeared in the code base (their was some Python), they would quietly walk away.
What I saw was also incredible because these, largely junior, programmers were using types for exactly the thing old-Haskell people had hoped they would. Things would ship to prod lightning fast as all engineers had to do was make sure the types all lined up and the compiler was happy and they would send the PR off!
But then I saw the downside: these type-happy programmers almost never tested anything. I'm not talking about formal unit tests or integration tests, some of those existed. I mean these were programmers that had entirely lost (or maybe never had) the ability to play around with the code that they just wrote and make sure it worked. I kid you not, "print debugging" was viewed as some advanced technique to do in emergency situations. When bugs were introduced to prod I would ask "did this work when you ran it locally?" only to be met with quizzical stares. If it pasted the type check it was good to go.
It also had the negative consequence of inadvertently discouraging abstraction in favor of just adding more complexity to your existing types. Because refactoring code takes time and the entire point of the type check doing all your thinking is to ship fast.
All that said, I'd much rather work with that code base than one made by a similarly proficient team in say Ruby.
There are tons of skilled (and less skilled) functional programmers out there. The real problem is if you're looking for both highly competent programmers who also happened to be hung up on a particular niche language. I'm sure there are plenty of excellent "Gooby" engineers out there, but they likely choose jobs based on other factors than the language being used.
That's not a TypeScript issue. I've encountered the same problem of not testing things properly in other languages. There's a definite mindset amongst some programmers that if it compiles and the unit tests pass, then it must work. I think a lot of less experienced devs have read too many blog posts on PL theory/testing and don't realize how many bugs are just not going to get caught by such techniques. You really do have to see something work with your own eyes and hammer it for a while by hand to know it's of a decent quality.
The fear of OOP is a problem though. I've encountered some really bad TypeScript/JS codebases that were just piles of top level functions for everything. The meme that OOP is bad is really damaging.
> But then I saw the downside: these type-happy programmers almost never tested anything.
To clarify: Are you saying they came to trust the compiler so much that they stopped doing local tests? If yes, this is an interesting point. When I toggle between Python and Java, I find the Java compiler has similar impact on me, as Python makes me so paranoid about runtime errors due to syntax.
That's a really interesting data point about your experience with TypeScript. I'm going to have to file that away as something that I'm not sure what to do with right now, but also as an interesting thought to keep in mind going forwards.
The author brings up some good points here, but I would just make sure to build my business around trading obscure financial instruments in a clever way, so as to generate such an overwhelming amount of profit that we can singlehandedly rewrite and maintain everything in our stack from scratch.
I acknowledge, however, a lot of people never think to do this when starting their business, and consequently run into all sorts of this kind of trouble, sadly.
I used to be more into functional programming but then I found other excuses to learn mathematics. I still think about how my imperative implementation can be turned into a functional one, or the other way around, but honestly the computer graphics programmers and machine learning engineers are doing cooler stuff. Even learning about category theory without needing to have an excuse to implement it makes it a lot more enjoyable.
One of brooks's papers (the guy that brooks's law is named after) is about how software developers would rather write the tools to solve the problem and then solve the problem itself.
A fair amount of this article is observing this problem persists 60 years later.
> how software developers would rather write the tools to solve the problem and then solve the problem itself.
That's because you know you'll be stuck with maintaining the solution. Nowadays, we have resume-driven people that just build stuff without any care as they know they're only here for two or three years.
This is a good post with good points. What languages do you consider "garden variety" these days? For me: JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, C#, Python, Ruby. Unless you have very specific systems programming needs, I would avoid C++ and Rust, as once the project grows complex enough, you need to hire very skills (read: expensive) engineers.
Great post and very relatable.
I too had my phase with a month of Haskell and then many more with Clojure.
Even some other lisp exploration.
It's a lot of fun, but I've since come to terms that from a career and business perspective I'm better off writing Python or Shell.
(I'm a Infra/Devops guy, if it matters)
If you've already decided to use Gooby, a senior engineer who has already made significant contributions to successful Gooby projects seems like an ideal hire. If you haven't decided to use it, it's a waste of their talents, which they're letting you know before you hire them.
There's another side to this where one attempts to take the pragmatic or business value view (it' seems so obvious to) and is met with ostracism by those that are entrenched in a specific technology.
Here is the problem in the article: nearly every language is going to have the (3) people.
Hire people for embedded C and you will run into some some people to whom C programming and their side projects in it are more important than whatever you're trying to ship.
Substitute anything. Rust, C++, Ruby, Java, ...
And of course the resume stuffing (1) people are also a language-independent problem.
Certain languages probably won't have too many people in the (2) category (excited recent grads). But those are the good candidates in relation to (1) and (3), according to the Gooby analysis in the article.
I'm actually suffering from the opposite problem. CTO is a well known Gooby developer. But we wrote everything in C++ because "it will be easier to hire down the line", pulling in well known C++ libraries by various bigcos that actually don't compose together and make a royal mess of the codebase. We've missed every single deadline, and are light years behind where we should be.
Honestly we should have written it in C, but I'm too far down the totem pole to make that call
The blog post has some reference numbers embedded, but I cannot find the references below. (Did I miss something?) Specifically, the author hinted about a language and a company for #1. I guess this is Jane Street with OCaml? To be clear, you can make any insane language choice that you wish, so long as you pay so much money that no one will care. Exhibit A: Jane Street with OCaml
Ah, I think you're referencing the sidenotes. Sometimes the website doesn't render properly on mobile (I've tried getting click-to-expand working, but it's tricky), so try reading in desktop mode.
Regarding sidenote #1, I actually very deliberately did not mention the language or company ;) Here's the full text of the sidenote, if you're still unable to get it rendering:
> I'm not going to name the language itself, because this post would just turn into a flame war over that language specifically, and I definitely don't want to cast shade on any language/community in particular. I'm also kind of hoping that the most annoying people read this and think, "Ah, of course he's talking about that language over there! This criticism obviously doesn't apply to my perfect and favorite language!" Regardless, I feel that the thesis and content of this post applies pretty evenly to most functional programming languages.
That's the thing, though. Gooby is just a means to an end; the ultimate end goal of your company is to write software that is useful to people and makes money. For the zealots, however, Gooby is the end in and of itself.
So, where's the difference? One doesn't care about what they sell as longs it makes them money, the other as long they have fun.
An insightful post, this point resonated with me in particular…
However, I think that we all need to be a little more honest with ourselves as software engineers. […] Are you sure you don't use Gooby just because it's fun to write?
Why? I use raku every day just because it’s fun to write!
Exactly this. I'm indifferent to the most popular, ubiquitous, top-10-on-every-X-list trends. It's a pattern: something gains massive adoption only to fizzle out a few years later. XML, the one-size-fits-all OOP, all-in microservices, Silverlight, Flash, etc.
Usually, there are some good, pragmatic reasons why something gets selected, and it is always accompanied by trade-offs. The decision is not mine alone to make; we need buy-in from everyone on the team. If the choice turns out to be not very delightful or fun, it becomes obvious - replace it. My initial reaction to the question "Why are you using Gooby? I've never even heard about it..." is always "because it's fun"
And it is absolutely normal to become a team where everyone enjoys Gooby, and they'd try to hire like-minded people.
I've been on several sides of this issue. I've been using Haskell for around 16 years, and I currently work on a product that's written almost entirely in Haskell on the backend. I've worked in a variety of languages throughout my career, and I've taken plenty of jobs that involved no FP at all, jobs that involved a mix of languages, and some that were primarily Haskell.
I've certainly seen people in the Haskell teams I've worked on who fit the article's description of people who were there to write Haskell and didn't care about much else. It didn't go great, but they were a minority of the people I've worked with.
Importantly, I've also seen plenty of that kind of behavior in other teams using other tech stacks. I've worked with "Agile people" whose answer to every problem is pair programming. I've worked with people who only care about microservices, or their favorite frontend framework. I've worked with people who see more object orientation as the solution to every problem more often than I've seen people who want to apply FP to every problem.
A few of these people can be find to have on a medium or larger sized team- if the worst of their instincts are tempered they can be a great source of internal education and advocacy, and they can bring expertise that can help you deal with the inevitable problems and tradeoffs that come with any technical choice. You just need to be careful to, on balance, have a team of mostly product-minded people.
Product people aren't necessarily tech-stack agnostic. To use myself as an example, I really like functional programming and I think it's often a good technical choice. At the end of the day though, my job is a job and I'm there to build the best product I can to make my employer (and myself) money. I've turned down Haskell jobs because I didn't believe in the product or team, and taken jobs in less preferred tech stacks because I did. A lot of people can be both enthusiasts and pragmatists, you just need to look for them.
I think one of the biggest issues I have with the article is that it overlooks a significant source of hiring: product minded people who are open to, but not specifically enthusiastic about your tech stack. People don't need to be an FP enthusiast to work in a functional language. I've written a lot of Python and Go in my career, even though neither of them are my favorite language. By the same token, there are plenty of people who can work with Haskell, OCaml, or a lisp just fine with a bit of training even if FP isn't something they are going to devote themselves to. I've worked with a lot of people who do Haskell in their day job, but prefer to spend their free time using Rust.
None of this is to say that everyone should go out and use an FP language. I think the most important factor in picking a language is generally going to be picking something that your team likes and understands well. Most languages are good enough at most problems that individual preference is going to matter more than technical concerns. If Haskell or OCaml or Gooby is that preferred language for your team, I don't think you should avoid it.
4. They're SREs/PEs who mastered concepts in breadth of many languages and depth down the stack. Some us are even EEs who can do EDA work too for your custom hardware devices and write custom kernel modules.
The way I see it, functional programming converts are often people who failed to properly grasp other, more challenging methodologies and decided that they need training wheels on their bikes. Though they won't frame it that way of course; they'll say that other methodologies lack the 'proper guardrails' which is telling...
I'm yet to meet an FP fanatic who actually properly understood OOP. Few seem to even understand the core principles of 'high cohesion, loose coupling' and fewer are even able translate that into a programming methodology.
My view of FP proponents is the opposite as the author claims. They're not rockstars who can master anything. More like the opposite; they're often people who are incapable of taking something complex and simplifying it. They're people who can't keep complexity under control and they need an external tool to do it for them.
> they're often people who are incapable of taking something complex and simplifying it.
Excuse me? Haven't a ton of things in recent years been simplified by borrowing ideas from FP?
LINQ in C#, Flask route decorators in Python, React Hooks and Redux reducers, Rx in Angular, Kafka streams, and more?
> Few seem to even understand the core principles
They do understand specific pain points experienced outside of FP - side effects, mutable state, uncontrolled complexity. Many FP proponents are well-versed in OOP but choose FP for reasons like simpler state management, declarative syntax, and powerful concurrency models.
> They're people who can't keep complexity under control
> they're often people who are incapable of taking something complex and simplifying it.
FP langs specifically provide advantages for easier reasoning about code, deterministic functions, and improved reusability. Why would someone willingly want to try and take control of exploding complexity if they have already know better tools to manage it? Tools that they understand more thoroughly and that feel more "natural" to them, closely aligning with mathematical function theory. Math is already one of the best tools for describing a vast number of things in the entire universe. Why would anyone who understands math want to go study some other voodoo-doll piercing technique, even if it claims to be particularly effective at solving specific problems?
Interesting take and it feels familiar. I'm definitely in the "I need a tool to keep complexity under control" camp but I don't see it as a bad thing. Coming from a support and sysadmin/ops position seeing the same kind of problem every time makes you want to avoid the problem class. Of course it's often a fantasy. However I realized most problems I experienced were due to a general lack of understanding of the tools and concepts used. This was Java, Spring Framework, Aspect Oriented Programming and an ORM wrapper (MyBATIS) and 99% of my ops problems were due to the devs working around and against these concepts and tools with lots of bad code and so many NPE's that I still get nightmares. A skilled crew of veterans familiar with i.e. Spring, MyBATIS could have refactored this in a few months and most problems would be gone just using each tool how it was meant to be used. But we only added poorly understood layers upon poorly understood layers...
I understand everyone that goes into functional programming after realizing classes of problems don't exist there. I like guardrails. I learned to like immutable functional data structures after realizing 70% of time is Java serialization in the flame graph and I'd rather had the clojure way of solving these problems instead of the hidden magic. But properly learning all the mentioned tools and not abusing them would be enough.
> I'm yet to meet an FP fanatic who actually properly understood OOP.
You just haven't met one who has realized that monads in FP map roughly to objects in OOP yet. :) Both are used for the same broad things: encapsulating/hiding/controlling state and allowing state transformations to be sequenced.
I actually have great sympathy for the functional programmer: having decided that managing both kinds of complexity is mentally exhausting, the functional programmer opts to eliminate, as much as possible, the accidental complexity of willy-nilly side effects in order to better address the inherent complexity of the problem domain. A good programmer can write mostly referentially transparent code with controlled side effects in any language, but it takes more care and forethought to do so in, say, Java.
This is why I say Lisp is really for bad programmers. If you're a programming genius, you can apply the same principles used in Lisp all the time to Java or even C++ code... it's just more work. Work you may not even notice because that stuff comes natural to you. But if you're a mid programmer, much of the friction of working in Java or C++ goes away in Lisp and you feel relieved of a burden. Much more feels within your reach. (I happen to love Lisp, and prefer working in it to anything else if I can, so maybe I'm a bad programmer.)
This hasn’t been my experience. One attraction of functional programming style is that you tend to separate pure/declarative code from effects, one way or another, and then express each using familiar patterns of computation or interaction that are the essence of what you’re implementing. This often results in simpler and more explicit code, with exactly the kind of high cohesion and low coupling you’re advocating.
It is no coincidence that an expressive functional language like Haskell has concise, descriptive names for numerous common folding patterns over common data structures such as mapAccumWithKey¹ that let you express what you want to achieve in just a line or two of code with minimal boilerplate or ambiguity, where using a generic loop in a mainstream imperative language would take 3x that and need a little thought to recognise the pattern being used and make sure there wasn’t anything else happening that was tangled up in the same code.
lll-o-lll|1 year ago
What attracts people to being a programmer? For some people it’s “looks like a reasonable job with good pay and conditions”. For others, it’s more “I love computers, programming, and abstract puzzles to solve”. This latter group (of which I am one), is more likely to provide both benefits and problems.
The benefit is they will generally be capable of greater innovation than the former group, but the downside is that they may just focus on interesting puzzles and ignore the needs of the (boring) business. Choosing an exotic language will greatly tilt the ratios towards this later group.
Most people in this later group can discipline themselves to focus on delivery, while remaining a great resource when truely challenging puzzles pop up. Most, but not all. Choosing a very esoteric language is pushing the curve far towards this tail, and the result will be many “brilliant, but useless to our business, people”.
Every small business needs a strong technical leader. I’m convinced of this. You need someone in charge that can stop the arguments, make people put down their toys, and remove people that cannot contribute for whatever reason. So this is my conclusion, it’s boring like so much of business. You need the right manager.
presentation|1 year ago
I love myself computers and probably more so earlier in my career than now, but I also like influencing people (often through code, with a focus less on algorithmic elegance but instead more on setting patterns, tooling, and APIs that influence how others build around them); and I also enjoy the challenge of aligning the pleasure of a juicy piece of elegant code against the pleasure of positive business outcomes. I think that makes me neither a “boring business person” nor a diehard code nerd, but somewhere at the intersection with attributes in other directions not captured by either stereotype.
That said, if you really are 100% motivated by abstract technical challenges, then maybe academia is more for you than industry is. Or working at the small slice of companies that truly make their bread and butter on cutting edge technical excellence and not, say, applying tried and true tools to some underserved niche.
I do find the “algorithm nerd” charisma also tends to intersect with having warped views of how the world operates and weak self-awareness, so maybe easier said than personally realized.
aleph_minus_one|1 year ago
> The benefit is they will generally be capable of greater innovation than the former group, but the downside is that they may just focus on interesting puzzles and ignore the needs of the (boring) business.
I think the problem rather is that many "business people" have a deep hate against people who love to think about whether there is a deeper hidden mathematical structure behind the business problems. Just to be clear: there also exist some few business people who appreciate this, but the latter are typically "nerds" who mostly switched to business because it pays much better.
It's not my experience that the latter group of programmers ignores the business problems, they just rather have their own much less anti-intellectual way of approaching them.
jqcoffey|1 year ago
I found out that unicorns are unicorns.
wavemode|1 year ago
To me, this doesn't seem to be a problem unique to functional programming languages. You'd have this problem when choosing any language outside the mainstream, I think.
From the article:
> Then, one thing leads to another, and you're knee deep in learning about homotopy type theory or continuations or whatever. Meanwhile, you're a week behind on that Jira ticket for issuing JSON Web Tokens because there's no actively maintained JWT libraries for Gooby.
You wouldn't have this problem in the first place if the language you chose -did- have an actively maintained JWT library.
Like, a company that chooses Haskell is a lot more likely to run into this problem than a company that chooses Clojure, due to the simple fact that Clojure can use Java libraries, whereas Haskell exists within its own isolated ecosystem. So, between the two, the likelihood is generally lower that you will, in the first place, run into a problem that Clojure can't easily solve.
So, in my mind, this essentially boils down to the same sort of risk/reward assessment you always need to make when choosing any language for any project.
yarekt|1 year ago
nextaccountic|1 year ago
And that's why we switch languages constantly. For some problems, some languages suck a little less.
anonzzzies|1 year ago
Actively maintained does not mean it’s good. We have to read and fork all libs we use (regulatory) so it won’t end up getting hacked etc, at least, less likely and a lot of ‘actively maintained libraries’ especially npms/pips are total garbage. We often spend less time just rolling ourselves than figuring out if this unreadable, overarchitected resume driven garbage even works.
aranchelk|1 year ago
drewcoo|1 year ago
It's hard to know from an interview what the quality of your Haskell code is.
It's probably relatively easy to find out in an interview that you had a lot of trouble with Clojure and are currently porting to Java.
BWStearns|1 year ago
They way overspent their strangeness budget[0] at every step of the stack. Even though I love (this) Gooby in general, in this case it has caused extreme damage to the organization.
I am still angry at the original devs for their choices because they basically poisoned the whole org against the language even though it would be useful for the org as a whole to adopt it in a non psychotic manner. It basically resulted in a reflexive ban for all Gooby in the future even when it might make sense.
[0] https://steveklabnik.com/writing/the-language-strangeness-bu...
pram|1 year ago
The company hired a very smart charlatan and he convinced them to start a greenfield project in Haskell. Then they need to hire Haskell developers for this specific thing because everyone else only knows Java and Python. Nearly a year later they're barely getting started, but it's getting hyped like you couldn't believe. A lot of sprint planning time starts to become 'how do we start integrating [New thing]' because the Directors have been fluffing it so hard.
Anyway it never got used in prod. The development turned into a disaster and the original guy quit. The team got dismantled and the whole thing got memory-holed. Anyone in the org hearing the word "Haskell" would invariably just think about it lol
kccqzy|1 year ago
bri3d|1 year ago
jt2190|1 year ago
Couple that with other challenges of running a niche stack in production and it can be quite a burden. Experienced, pragmatic developers will have techniques for managing this even in a functional language, but again, pragmatic may require compromise that doesn’t sit well with the purist.
dboreham|1 year ago
jballanc|1 year ago
What is your favorite programming language/library/technology?
What do you hate about it?
Anyone that jumps to answer the first but struggles to answer the second is likely not someone you want to hire.
lmm|1 year ago
sesm|1 year ago
But I think that author is missing at least one more category: senior engineers that worked in multiple programming languages over their career, who can see how design of Gooby and values of it's community create a better programming environment.
Chris_Newton|1 year ago
I once wrote some Haskell professionally. It was a successor to a previous generation of the application that I had written in Python and maintained for several years. Using Haskell was my choice and it was made because some of Haskell’s strengths would address specific pain points learned from that experience. Meanwhile, everything else I wrote for that client was still being done in mainstream languages for mainstream reasons and there was never any suggestion that we would rewrite anything else in Haskell or adopt it by default for any new work, so I think this situation is clearly distinct from category 3 in the article.
unknown|1 year ago
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warcher|1 year ago
What’s the right language? Probably the language you’re already using for the rest of your stuff so we can interface with the rest of the org efficiently.
Is it new? Grab whatever the industry standard is for your segment. Lots of libs, lots of mindshare, easy to hire, get it done.
I do get caught in HR filters a lot without a bunch of projects in gooby though.
tjbai|1 year ago
This is incredible
lijok|1 year ago
saithound|1 year ago
Multi-armed bandits were introduced in the 50s, years after the end of World War 2.
bavell|1 year ago
[0] https://xkcd.com/356
kreetx|1 year ago
RheingoldRiver|1 year ago
chrisco255|1 year ago
joe_the_user|1 year ago
And this article sadly shows why. Objectively, they aren't fair to "Goody engineers". Often, they mean opinionated engineers. Now opinionated engineers can be good and bad for profits - they work hard and point maybe good direction and maybe bad directions. But they make the company harder to sell and that objectively reduces the stock price and so it's bad from the "economic standpoint" even if it makes profits somewhat higher.
MajimasEyepatch|1 year ago
resonious|1 year ago
agentultra|1 year ago
You get programming astronauts in every language. There’s nothing special about Gooby or functional programmers that makes them deficient in the ways described. You could easily replace Gooby with Rust, Lisp, Python, C++, C#, Java, JS.
What makes the functional programming astronauts stand out is pure optics. If you’re tolerant of C++ templates or Python’s metaclasses you might view discussions on Profunctors to sound like gibberish. If you’re not someone who even uses those tools at all and avoid them out of principal it can sound like a plot for a hostile takeover. To an experienced Haskell programmer it’s likely to be fairly banal.
Which kind of blows this whole theory that Gooby programmers are the problem.
The real problem are those who seek to use a hammer regardless of what problem they’re trying to solve. I’m certain anyone whose been around for a while had encountered the “patterns astronaut,” who will view every problem as an opportunity to figure out how to apply as many GoF patterns as possible. These are the misguided souls we need to bring back into the fold.
jll29|1 year ago
After a posting on the Haskell mailing list, zero responses came back.
We realized the world had about 3 people that matched all the requirements: one was the dev that needed to be replaced, the other one was a tenured professor of a U.S. university (Hi, Hal!), and there was one more, whom I don't remember but it may just as well have been Simon Peyton-Jones himself (only slightly exaggerating here).
Note the Haskel NLP mailing list - https://archives.haskell.org/projects-pipermail/nlp/ - did not exist then, it was formed only in 2009.
In the end, I forced a complete re-write in Java of our initial "rapidly prototyped" Haskell codebase at the time, and I often wonder what I would do nowadays, nearly 20 years later (Python is slow, has the commercial disadvantage of letting customers read off your secret sauce if code runs on their machines, but has a good dev pool to hire from, and definitely is both high-level enough as well as suitable regarding library support; ironically, Java is still a contender, despite the boilerplate Kotlin isn't getting the traction that Rust is getting against C, C++ has changed dramatically every 5 years in the 20 years since, and still ads complexity, which is all very scary, and Julia has a small talent pool, and isn't ready for prime time yet, certainly not regarding NLP libraries).
I know, since this is HN, people will say "LISP!", but I'm not sure; I always loved the aestetics of Scheme, but not the ergonomics - and my conjecture is there might be something about keywords that makes them superior cognitively for humans compared to just piles of nested parentheses.
EDIT: fixed a typo.
downrightmike|1 year ago
singpolyma3|1 year ago
skydhash|1 year ago
It's the nature of the language and the VM that it runs in. The code is data and data is code. You can construct a list and then decide to evaluate it. Or the current code you're writing is actually data for another piece of code. It's a paradigm that really opens the computation mindset.
The VM looks like the common REPL you see in Python, but it's more powerful. It's more like a OS installation than a language interpreter. You can inspect anything, patch anything. When paired with an editor, that means you can only apply part of the code and then rerun part of the code. You can also try stuff and then formalize stuff down in code, no need to rerun the whole program.
For me, the parenthesis are the same as Python's whitespaces and colons. Or C-like language and their brackets and semicolons. Just syntax. After a while, you just don't notice them other than check that the expression is correct.
PheonixPharts|1 year ago
I have a long history of doing FP in a bunch of the traditional FP languages (Scheme/Haskell/etc). Ended up working at a young startup with equally young employees awhile back and was sort of surprised to see that the long heralded fantasy of cranky FP enthusiasts has, for better or worse, come true in Type Script.
I saw a generation of new programmers truly doing type-driven development and using a range of functional programming techniques without them even realizing that this was a big thing. Funnily enough they were terrified of anything resembling object oriented programming. If the word "class" appeared in the code base (their was some Python), they would quietly walk away.
What I saw was also incredible because these, largely junior, programmers were using types for exactly the thing old-Haskell people had hoped they would. Things would ship to prod lightning fast as all engineers had to do was make sure the types all lined up and the compiler was happy and they would send the PR off!
But then I saw the downside: these type-happy programmers almost never tested anything. I'm not talking about formal unit tests or integration tests, some of those existed. I mean these were programmers that had entirely lost (or maybe never had) the ability to play around with the code that they just wrote and make sure it worked. I kid you not, "print debugging" was viewed as some advanced technique to do in emergency situations. When bugs were introduced to prod I would ask "did this work when you ran it locally?" only to be met with quizzical stares. If it pasted the type check it was good to go.
It also had the negative consequence of inadvertently discouraging abstraction in favor of just adding more complexity to your existing types. Because refactoring code takes time and the entire point of the type check doing all your thinking is to ship fast.
All that said, I'd much rather work with that code base than one made by a similarly proficient team in say Ruby.
There are tons of skilled (and less skilled) functional programmers out there. The real problem is if you're looking for both highly competent programmers who also happened to be hung up on a particular niche language. I'm sure there are plenty of excellent "Gooby" engineers out there, but they likely choose jobs based on other factors than the language being used.
mike_hearn|1 year ago
The fear of OOP is a problem though. I've encountered some really bad TypeScript/JS codebases that were just piles of top level functions for everything. The meme that OOP is bad is really damaging.
throwaway2037|1 year ago
snapdaddy|1 year ago
jsyang00|1 year ago
I acknowledge, however, a lot of people never think to do this when starting their business, and consequently run into all sorts of this kind of trouble, sadly.
eric-hu|1 year ago
juancn|1 year ago
Getting lost in the "tech $X is better for this than $Y" can easily become a distraction. Engineering is a form of applied science for money.
Since it's economically driven, the two most important things you as an engineer need to know are:
- who is paying for this?
- why?
Those two questions should underpin every single decision you make. If you lose sight of that, theres a huge chance you won't succeed.
DrDroop|1 year ago
readthenotes1|1 year ago
A fair amount of this article is observing this problem persists 60 years later.
skydhash|1 year ago
That's because you know you'll be stuck with maintaining the solution. Nowadays, we have resume-driven people that just build stuff without any care as they know they're only here for two or three years.
andrewstuart|1 year ago
There’s plenty of mainstream programming languages that get the job done just fine without the hiring problems.
I’m 100% certain you don’t “need” gooby.
Hiring for gooby doesn’t scale, so unless your company’s goal is to stay small, don’t use gooby. And “the CTO likes it” isn’t good enough reason.
The original gooby loving CTO always leaves to spread more gooby to other companies and the owners of the company are left with a long term problem.
Just use the garden variety languages that there is a large talent pool for.
Do your gooby at home on your personal projects.
throwaway2037|1 year ago
_xiaz|1 year ago
mjmsmith|1 year ago
redpoint|1 year ago
kazinator|1 year ago
Hire people for embedded C and you will run into some some people to whom C programming and their side projects in it are more important than whatever you're trying to ship.
Substitute anything. Rust, C++, Ruby, Java, ...
And of course the resume stuffing (1) people are also a language-independent problem.
Certain languages probably won't have too many people in the (2) category (excited recent grads). But those are the good candidates in relation to (1) and (3), according to the Gooby analysis in the article.
throwawaymaths|1 year ago
Honestly we should have written it in C, but I'm too far down the totem pole to make that call
nicce|1 year ago
throwaway2037|1 year ago
_peeley|1 year ago
Regarding sidenote #1, I actually very deliberately did not mention the language or company ;) Here's the full text of the sidenote, if you're still unable to get it rendering:
> I'm not going to name the language itself, because this post would just turn into a flame war over that language specifically, and I definitely don't want to cast shade on any language/community in particular. I'm also kind of hoping that the most annoying people read this and think, "Ah, of course he's talking about that language over there! This criticism obviously doesn't apply to my perfect and favorite language!" Regardless, I feel that the thesis and content of this post applies pretty evenly to most functional programming languages.
kiviuq|1 year ago
So, where's the difference? One doesn't care about what they sell as longs it makes them money, the other as long they have fun.
librasteve|1 year ago
However, I think that we all need to be a little more honest with ourselves as software engineers. […] Are you sure you don't use Gooby just because it's fun to write?
Why? I use raku every day just because it’s fun to write!
djaouen|1 year ago
No. I don’t do anything (by choice) if it is not fun.
iLemming|1 year ago
Usually, there are some good, pragmatic reasons why something gets selected, and it is always accompanied by trade-offs. The decision is not mine alone to make; we need buy-in from everyone on the team. If the choice turns out to be not very delightful or fun, it becomes obvious - replace it. My initial reaction to the question "Why are you using Gooby? I've never even heard about it..." is always "because it's fun"
And it is absolutely normal to become a team where everyone enjoys Gooby, and they'd try to hire like-minded people.
labradore|1 year ago
rebeccaskinner|1 year ago
I've certainly seen people in the Haskell teams I've worked on who fit the article's description of people who were there to write Haskell and didn't care about much else. It didn't go great, but they were a minority of the people I've worked with.
Importantly, I've also seen plenty of that kind of behavior in other teams using other tech stacks. I've worked with "Agile people" whose answer to every problem is pair programming. I've worked with people who only care about microservices, or their favorite frontend framework. I've worked with people who see more object orientation as the solution to every problem more often than I've seen people who want to apply FP to every problem.
A few of these people can be find to have on a medium or larger sized team- if the worst of their instincts are tempered they can be a great source of internal education and advocacy, and they can bring expertise that can help you deal with the inevitable problems and tradeoffs that come with any technical choice. You just need to be careful to, on balance, have a team of mostly product-minded people.
Product people aren't necessarily tech-stack agnostic. To use myself as an example, I really like functional programming and I think it's often a good technical choice. At the end of the day though, my job is a job and I'm there to build the best product I can to make my employer (and myself) money. I've turned down Haskell jobs because I didn't believe in the product or team, and taken jobs in less preferred tech stacks because I did. A lot of people can be both enthusiasts and pragmatists, you just need to look for them.
I think one of the biggest issues I have with the article is that it overlooks a significant source of hiring: product minded people who are open to, but not specifically enthusiastic about your tech stack. People don't need to be an FP enthusiast to work in a functional language. I've written a lot of Python and Go in my career, even though neither of them are my favorite language. By the same token, there are plenty of people who can work with Haskell, OCaml, or a lisp just fine with a bit of training even if FP isn't something they are going to devote themselves to. I've worked with a lot of people who do Haskell in their day job, but prefer to spend their free time using Rust.
None of this is to say that everyone should go out and use an FP language. I think the most important factor in picking a language is generally going to be picking something that your team likes and understands well. Most languages are good enough at most problems that individual preference is going to matter more than technical concerns. If Haskell or OCaml or Gooby is that preferred language for your team, I don't think you should avoid it.
banish-m4|1 year ago
ggm|1 year ago
coolThingsFirst|1 year ago
neeh0|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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jongjong|1 year ago
I'm yet to meet an FP fanatic who actually properly understood OOP. Few seem to even understand the core principles of 'high cohesion, loose coupling' and fewer are even able translate that into a programming methodology.
My view of FP proponents is the opposite as the author claims. They're not rockstars who can master anything. More like the opposite; they're often people who are incapable of taking something complex and simplifying it. They're people who can't keep complexity under control and they need an external tool to do it for them.
iLemming|1 year ago
Excuse me? Haven't a ton of things in recent years been simplified by borrowing ideas from FP? LINQ in C#, Flask route decorators in Python, React Hooks and Redux reducers, Rx in Angular, Kafka streams, and more?
> Few seem to even understand the core principles
They do understand specific pain points experienced outside of FP - side effects, mutable state, uncontrolled complexity. Many FP proponents are well-versed in OOP but choose FP for reasons like simpler state management, declarative syntax, and powerful concurrency models.
> They're people who can't keep complexity under control
> they're often people who are incapable of taking something complex and simplifying it.
FP langs specifically provide advantages for easier reasoning about code, deterministic functions, and improved reusability. Why would someone willingly want to try and take control of exploding complexity if they have already know better tools to manage it? Tools that they understand more thoroughly and that feel more "natural" to them, closely aligning with mathematical function theory. Math is already one of the best tools for describing a vast number of things in the entire universe. Why would anyone who understands math want to go study some other voodoo-doll piercing technique, even if it claims to be particularly effective at solving specific problems?
nisa|1 year ago
I understand everyone that goes into functional programming after realizing classes of problems don't exist there. I like guardrails. I learned to like immutable functional data structures after realizing 70% of time is Java serialization in the flame graph and I'd rather had the clojure way of solving these problems instead of the hidden magic. But properly learning all the mentioned tools and not abusing them would be enough.
bitwize|1 year ago
You just haven't met one who has realized that monads in FP map roughly to objects in OOP yet. :) Both are used for the same broad things: encapsulating/hiding/controlling state and allowing state transformations to be sequenced.
I actually have great sympathy for the functional programmer: having decided that managing both kinds of complexity is mentally exhausting, the functional programmer opts to eliminate, as much as possible, the accidental complexity of willy-nilly side effects in order to better address the inherent complexity of the problem domain. A good programmer can write mostly referentially transparent code with controlled side effects in any language, but it takes more care and forethought to do so in, say, Java.
This is why I say Lisp is really for bad programmers. If you're a programming genius, you can apply the same principles used in Lisp all the time to Java or even C++ code... it's just more work. Work you may not even notice because that stuff comes natural to you. But if you're a mid programmer, much of the friction of working in Java or C++ goes away in Lisp and you feel relieved of a burden. Much more feels within your reach. (I happen to love Lisp, and prefer working in it to anything else if I can, so maybe I'm a bad programmer.)
Chris_Newton|1 year ago
It is no coincidence that an expressive functional language like Haskell has concise, descriptive names for numerous common folding patterns over common data structures such as mapAccumWithKey¹ that let you express what you want to achieve in just a line or two of code with minimal boilerplate or ambiguity, where using a generic loop in a mainstream imperative language would take 3x that and need a little thought to recognise the pattern being used and make sure there wasn’t anything else happening that was tangled up in the same code.
¹ https://hackage.haskell.org/package/containers-0.7/docs/Data...
danielscrubs|1 year ago
I think one of the problems is that we just don’t have people that we admire in programming compared to other areas like biology or literature.