Comment by mahboi

5 hours ago

Erlang is my favorite functional language out of all the ones I've tried. The matchers, guards, etc are all done very well. But I don't like functional. I used to think it was cool, gave it a real chance using Erlang for years, and eventually decided it's not a good fit for many use cases. Like at some point the neatness of doing all loops as recursion wears off and it's just tiring. It's not like CS algo homework, and even there you often want DP/memoization.

Edit: pure* functional

3 comments

mahboi

Reply
sodapopcan  4 hours ago

> Like at some point the neatness of doing all loops as recursion wears off and it's just tiring.

Odd, but I believe you, lol. Elixir's list comprehensions take a `:reduce` option which makes accumulating values a bit more "familiar" and I often use over `reduce`:

    for a <- list, reduce: []
      acc ->
        [a | acc]
    end

Not sure if there is something like that in Erlang (or Gleam for that matter).

  • mahboi  4 hours ago

    If you already have a list in Erlang, you can use map and the foldl/foldr reducers. But there's no general for-loop. You're expected to use tail recursion.

    Also tbh, I don't like reduce either. I agree with that article posted on HN a while back about devs not liking reduce. Just want to insert into my list or whatever, not have to check how exactly reduce works in this particular language.

    • sodapopcan  1 hour ago

      > you can use map and the foldl/foldr reducers

      Ya, I was saying as an alternative to a more dynamic-looking loop. And I should note that `for` is confusing in Elixir because it is not a for loop, it's a list comprehension. Also, `<-` is actually a match operator and can cause confusion if you think of it as a for loop. I'm actually not sure why they went with `for`. At one point it was `lc`. I do think `for` is better than `lc`, heh.

      But yes, I don't hate reduce, but I do try and avoid it in favour of a higher level version if its available. My only real problem with reduce is that I sometimes forget the parameter order, which is why I like using list comprehensions since the accumulator gets labelled.