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Comment by mika9090 | Hacker News Reader

People just don't have enough experience with Functional Programming to really know how awful it is. So now it is the new kid on the block (in terms of going mainstream) so people think it is the best thing ever.

The most telling sign is how many FP languages are in existence today. If it was such a good thing we wouldn't need them all. It is a mess that cause many other types of problems without any clear benefit.

I do get that many people like the FP paradigm, no two humans are alike and people will find different ways of thinking and reasoning about a problem more suitable. Which is OK. BUT it doesn't mean FP is a any better than OPP or vice versa.

Last I would like to point out how Python (OOP) obliterated R (FP) it the Data Science market although R enjoyed a head start of few years and was the Franca Lingua of statisticians.

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R was used by statisticians, but python was used by every non-cs researcher who needed something more than matlab.

Python didn't beat R because it's OO. It won because of its existing popularity (with many people learning it in their intro programming class) and the massive amounts of open source software built for it.

> People just don't have enough experience with Functional Programming to really know how awful it is

This is just anecdotal, but I've used a FP language full-time for the last two years with several other engineers and ramped others up on the codebase. It has its own challenges but it's significantly easier for me to reason about than OOP - less bugs, easier to maintain, easier to parse. I can't see myself ever willingly going back.

It might be helpful to know what problems you think FP has, if you have a significant amount of experience with it.

> Python didn't beat R because it's OO ...

My point that it beat R although it is OOP. This is to show that OOP is not inherently bad. Many people find it useful to the point the 'preserved' advantages of FP are not worth the effort.

> This is just anecdotal ...

My anecdote story is very different than yours. To the point if one of my engineers will ever suggest FP again he will get fired on the spot.

> To the point if one of my engineers will ever suggest FP again he will get fired on the spot.

If you are going to react so disproportionately to the mere suggestion of FP, I am sorry, it is difficult to take your anecdote or opinion seriously.

> The most telling sign is how many FP languages are in existence today. If it was such a good thing we wouldn't need them all.

This is a silly argument. FP means only first-class functions and immutable values, and the vast majority of FP languages agree on those.

But there are many other design decisions for a programming language - type system, laziness, purity, homoiconicity, and whatever other features, paradigms or constraints people might find desirable. THIS is what explains the diversity of FP languages.

Btw, there's the exact same phenomenon in OOP languages. They all agree on classes, and differ on hundreds of other aspects.

Python "winning" has more to do with it being taught at pretty much every university in into CS courses these days and less with it being a better suited language for it. Besides, outside data science R still reigns supreme when it comes to statistics. Data science is a hype right now, but 99% of what is called data science is basic statistics. Python is also rarely being taught in biology, or economy or psychology departments. Its either R or Stata or so.

We don’t have more FP languages than OOP languages, and several languages that are considered FP have their own implementation of OOP (OCaml, Common Lisp...) in addition, several OOP languages are now implementing classic FP features like lambdas and pattern matching.

Also, the question asked doesn’t actually care about FP. Go isn’t a functional language, bit neither is it OO.

You are right, it should have been a comment to another person on this thread. Not the OP.

My point regarding the number of FP languages that it is not a silver bullet, neither is OOP to be sure, but FP has its own set of problems hence the many different implementations.

Regarding OOP languages implementing classic FP features, which is true and a blessing! These are good features which IMHO gives more credit to OOP languages.

Regarding number of languages, I don’t agree that it signifies a problem. For instance, F# doesn’t exist because OCaml is bad, but because there was room for a functional language with good interop with .NET. Same story with Clojure vs Common Lisp.

Making a new language doesn’t automaticly imply that some other language got something wrong.

Go lets me do enough object oriented programming to keep me more productive, while not creating a pile of confusion.

Sadly, there seems to be almost no functional programming concepts supported that I'd use (map, filter, reduce, lambdas). I think the lack of generics and operator overloading might have something to do with that?

Yes. I’d assume those would come rather quickly once generics are added.

Has Python actually "won"? I was under the impression that both languages are popular with data scientists.

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