Comment by mbo
7 years ago
> Why can't FP's benefits be obvious so that it doesn't require evangelists?
Because there aren't immediate benefits. They only pop out at scale and with complexity, as I said.
> similar real world massive productivity improvement to Imperative Programming
Because there isn't. It's a reasonable benefit, but it's not transformative. I think it's there, enough to commit to FP completely, but the massive productivity improvement doesn't exist, or at least, only exists in specific cases, e.g. the WhatsApp + Erlang + 50 engineers parable (you could argue that this is due to the actor model and BEAM, rather than FP. An argument for a different day).
I feel like this hard + reasonable benefit isn't really efficient utilisation of people's time, especially when there's things like Deep Learning floating around. I think the immediate reaction to a lot of what FP evangelists claim is a shrug and a "I guess, but why bother?"
>> Because there aren't immediate benefits. They only pop out at scale and with complexity, as I said.
What about low-barrier situation with scale and complexity ?
An imaginary situation:let's say you start building your system from a large open-source project that needs a lot of customization.
Will FP be of big enough benefit than ?
I'm curios about the answer, but for a sec, let's assume it does:
Than could it be a uni project ? dig into the belly of 2 beast projects, one FP, one OOP. And see the difference in what you could achieve.
Could something like that work ?