Comment by iLemming

2 years ago

> 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?