Comment by applepple
5 years ago
>> I feel really sorry for you if...
I never said that this is what I believe. I said it's what a lot of people in the corporate sphere believe. It's the opposite of what I believe.
OOP solves complex problems in a simple way.
Functional Programming solves simple problems in a complex way.
Some concepts from FP are useful when applied within OOP, but pure FP is simply not practical. It doesn't scale in terms of code size, it's inefficient, it's inflexible, it takes longer to develop and maintain, it's less readable because it encourages devs to write long chains of logic spread out across many files. FP's lack of emphasis on important concepts such as blackboxing, high cohesion and loose coupling encourages developers to produce poor abstractions whose names sound highly technical but whose responsibilities are vague and impossible to explain without a long list of contrived statements which have little in common with one another.
Abstractions in FP tend to be all over the place. It seems to encourage vague, unstructured thinking. Decoupling state from logic makes it impossible to produce abstractions which are high cohesion and loosely coupled. It forces every component to mind every other component's business.
This is madness. If you don't care about structure, why not just write the entire system as a single file and define thousands of functions which call each other all over the place? You would get the same spaghetti, but you would save yourself the effort of having to jump around all these files which don't add any meaningful structure anyway.
I feel really sorry for you if you believe a word of what you wrote above.
It's always the case that when I present these arguments above to FP devs, they respond with personal insults instead of counter-arguments. This suggests that they know my arguments are accurate but they are too invested in FP and are in denial - It's emotional, so they respond emotionally.
You shouldn't think of it like "I've been fooled and wasted all this time on FP". You should think about it like "I gave FP a thorough analysis over several years and it was a worthwhile experiment which didn't work out but I learned a lot from it".
I also spent quite a lot of time working with and reading FP code over the last 15 years. That's why I can criticize it with confidence today. It was not a waste.
Comments like "Functional Programming solves simple problems in a complex way, "Abstractions in FP tend to be all over the place." or "If you don't care about structure, why not just write the entire system as a single file and define thousands of functions which call each other all over the place?" don't really invite polite discussion. To me they look like you either are reacting on pure emotion, or don't understand what you are writing about (note that this opposite of "accurate"). It also seems that you think that I'm whatever you believe "functional programmers" are.
If there's something we maybe agree on, it's that enforcing pure functionality (I guess that's what you're writing about. If you think functions as first class objects is bad, you're incorrigibly wrong) is about as bad as maximal OOP that Martin is preaching. There's a lot of space between these two extremes if you're willing to look. And a lot of money to be made by sticking to an ideology and preaching it.
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