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Comment by non_repro_blue | Hacker News Reader

The meme is becoming lame.

Talentless developers who fight and argue are the only real hazard in the world of programming.

Mature trends and languages have attracted decades of developers good and bad, and because they're widely used, they have the misfortune of also providing a home to the largest corpus of terrible code.

Mark my words: in a generation, functional programming will accumulate just as much garbage, inadequately programmed by just as many careless and/or passive-aggressive developers desperately clinging to their jobs throughout the next wave of whatever becomes the next Steve Ballmer stack ranking code review process.

It doesn't matter how many words or ideas you throw at this circumstance. Terrible developers will still manage to commit garbage.

Life finds a way.

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I feel this counter meme (programming languages/language features/paradigms aren't bad, developers are) also get's thrown around a lot, but I don't understand the argument.

Are all languages really equally good? Is C really no more productive than assembly? Is Swift really no more productive than Objective-C? For many higher level applications is Java really no more productive than C? Doesn't using something higher level like Python make certain kinds of tasks easier than the same task in Java?

Since the inception of programming languages, there has been continuous improvement of the existing languages as well creation of new languages, both of which have introduced new paradigms and features to programming. These new features and paradigms often replace older features and paradigms. Not everything works, but much of the time the new features and paradigms have made writing and maintaining good programs much easier.

Unless you believe our current tools are already completely optimal, it seems only natural to try to improve upon them.

So is your argument that programming languages in a generation will be equal productive/un-productive as what we have now? That seems too pessimistic to me. I think our tools will be much better, just as I feel our tools now are better than they were in 2000 or 1990.

If the argument is that functional programming is not an improvement, that's fine, how do you see languages improving? What's the direction they should take?

Turing tarpits aside, people speak very highly of C, just as they may do the same for assembly, but depending on context.

Languages fill a niche, and outside of their area of utility it's easy to notice weaknesses.

But arguments in favor of functions are similar to those in favor of objects. They both joust for the award of being adept at doing more with less code, in terms of mythical-man-month project scalability.

I've experienced that problem with huge OOP code trees, and I still don't foresee Pure Functional programming supplying a cure for that problem. Maybe I'm just not one of the lucky ones yet. I don't know.

But when I read Pure Functional code, even though it's tighter, with less boiler plate, it doesn't feel like honest improvement. It's like Coke or Pepsi, McDonalds or Burger King.

OOP might yeild thousands of source files and hundreds of lines per some files, but if a Pure Functional project does the same thing with fewer lines of code in fewer files, it's still doing the same thing.

So in a decade you'll probably find the same complaints, in the same places, but at least people will have different hair styles.

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