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stmartin | 14 years ago | on: Functional Programming Is Hard, That's Why It's Good

Controversial is hiding a bastard child in plain sight for 10+ years while running a state. You're not :).

Joke aside - I don't want to write essays here, so I'm gonna try to make a hopefully brief point.

I -know- your essay was well-intentioned, and believe me, so is my reaction, after having written software for a living for nearly 15 years...

Rather than to expound - let me ask you - do you know of Martin Fowler? I can get Graham and his cult-like persona has ensnared you/others somewhat in his FP-Kool-Aid cult :D... but read Fowler for a bit of balance too.

Your intention was actually awesome - you want to illustrate a general principle, e.g. an abstraction, that thinking via and writing through a functional paradigm/language makes you a better programmer. Is that "true" to the extent you and a bunch of other FP-evangelists claim? Why, yes it is! So is learning assembly language, or Brainf*ck for that matter....

Why I mentioned and really enjoy reading Fowler's non-imposing, well-argumented style of writing is because he effectively does, what you bravely attempt to do here, convey a general principle about _programming languages_, except he does it expertly, whereas you do it naively, despite the good intention. To get what I'm saying, surf over to www.amzn.com, and get yourself a copy of Fowler's Domain Specific Languages.

Upon reading that book, heck, even half way, you soon come to the same realization that what one of the other repliers to my original rant has come into some time ago - we are ultimately discussing various paradigms/philosophies of thinking. Not ONE single or multiple paradigms that are tailored to your particular way of thinking or that you are "hard wired" for (which I find hard to believe, but I'll grant some 'nature vs nurture' arguments here too), makes you or anyone else, me included, necessarily a 'better' programmer... I'd go as far as saying that it's probably your personality, mental/emotional states you experience on a daily basis while glued to your PC, that have you be more or less effective at programming, e.g. you're a 'perfectionist/procrastinator', most common among programmers, or you're extreme and reckless and use inadequate tools to just conjure something up, looking to get 'promoted' and it blows up a few months later or BSOD's in a demo to the board of directors....

This has been said over and over, and for some reason, it doesn't sink in - there is no silver bullet, there is no 'better/worse' programmer - unless you count lines of code produced per day as a 'productivity measure', hardly a clever measure of anything...

Back to your essay - I'd much rater you embark on the topic of DSLs, rather than using CL as a platform to write a DSL in - which is -fine- except maybe people who are unfamiliar with Lisp's syntax, e.g. domain experts, can relate to a specific, external DSL better than they can relate to a LISP based DSL...

Think of teaching a DSL to a ... I dunno, a postal worker who examines mail rejects that didn't pass the OCR phase. You could construct a DSL specific to that purpose. It would be relevant and useful and increase the worker's productivity.

On the flipside, teaching him Lisp, such that he can learn a DSL designed inside of Lisp, would be a pain in the ass...

DSLs, e.g. macros, are one of the highly touted benefits of Common Lisp, which I actually like, because of its multiparadigm ('dirty') nature...

Anyway, I don't really want to indulge here - I think if you are serious about writing something, which I believe you are - be as balances as you can be, and never throw ANYONE under the bridge - including people who have only coded VB in their life.... You are either on board w/all people, or you're alone.

Smugness about a particular paradigm is something I'd stay away from, as well as people who hypnotize you with their eloquence and "successes" (financial or otherwise) into thinking that they've discovered the next best thing since sliced bread.....

This is why, as much as I like my Macbook, I still think Apple's a cult, and that Linux will eventually prevail, even on mobile platforms, tablets, etc.

Peace.

stmartin | 14 years ago | on: Functional Programming Is Hard, That's Why It's Good

"I think it is a lot about the way you think"

Brother, you are on the money with that statement. But the MINUTE I make a religion out of the way _I_ or a bunch of eclectics uber-geeks think, is the minute you bring about the demise and distaste of that particular paradigm of thinking.

I can relate to the 'way of thinking' better than these stupid religious arguments about FP. Did you know you can program in an OO fashion in C? Or even in Lisp, if you really cared to? You could also write a very 'functional' program in C if you really wanted to.

Why is everything black and white with geeks, is beyond my wildest dreams - but it just points to a lack of mature thinking.

stmartin | 14 years ago | on: Functional Programming Is Hard, That's Why It's Good

This is the lie that every functional programmer has perpetuated for the last 50 years since the dawn of Lisp - that somehow, automagically, productivity or effectiveness of programmers increase with the use of functional languages.

It's the biggest lie in the programming world, and it was designed to make the uber-geeks of this world, those people that you walk around the block just to avoid saying hello to because you know they are deeply and profoundly anti-social, feel good about themselves, to feel special, as though they have the "upper hand" that other normal people who deliberately choose other languages over purely functional ones.

There is value in learning how to think recursively, but a lot of programming, especially systems programming doesn't need to have its for loops transformed into recursive functions, or its addition operators into primitive recursive functions.

I am sick and tired of people expounding on the alleged efficacy and efficiency of functional languages and I wish they would just STFU once and for all and go back to their porn intermezzos between their functional programming spurts.

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