Re: The state of functional programming

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:24:08 -0700 (PDT), J.s wrote:

> As I am continuing my freshman year of college majoring in cs it seems
> I stand alone with the view of abuse or at least over-use of OOP
> concepts and the knowledge of functional programming in general.

OOP is over-used? And knowledge of FP is what?

> Of the many people I have met who are currently or have recently
> graduated with a cs degree, very few have ever learned any functional
> programming or anything other than c# and java.

Maybe

> What recently got my attention though was an article I found on f#
> from one of Microsoft developer's blogs  [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/
> dsyme/archive/2010/04/12/f-2-0-released-as-part-of-visual-
> studio-2010.aspx]. In it Don Syme (a developer of f#) explains what
> both f# is to other programmers, but the part that disturbed me was
> where Syme implies functional programmers are not "focus(ed) on ...
> the process of writing code":
> 
> "Q: What is functional programming?
> 
> Functional programming languages express ideas at a higher level and
> allow users to focus on the challenge of problem solving instead of
> the process of writing code.

This claim was made for each and every programming paradigm. It need to be
substantiated, and especially for FP, which does not look very promising at
all.

> A programming language like F# provides a
> οΏ½tool bagοΏ½ of functions that users can pick from to solve their
> problem.

I.e. the decomposition is procedural, welcome back in 60's...

> Functional programming includes concepts such as
> immutability to reduce dependencies between components,

How is immutability to reduce dependence? An immutable argument must be
taken from somewhere. And immutable results does not even exist. He
probably meant side effects. It is to be shown that procedural
decomposition to reduce need in side effects. I doubt it does. And the
whole computing is about side effects. Programming is how side effects can
be engineered.

> generics to
> express solutions that work over many different kinds of data,

Different kinds of data? He probably meant types. Ah, but types smell OOP,
right? I hope it is not about passing integer where real expected?

GP is about dealing with sets of types. To substantiate the claim it is to
show how types and their sets can be described and manipulated within FP,
easier, quicker, safer, more maintainable etc.

> and
> functions as values to make it easy to abstract units of a solution
> into reusable pieces.

Function as a value of what? And what is the difference? Maybe a side
effect of the call? Anyway I don't see how values can be reusable.

> Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

FP is yet another attempt to make programming declarative. That won't
happen until last programmer dies.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de