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Comment by hvs | Hacker News Reader

I think he has a good point, and as someone who really likes functional languages, I agree with him, but I think there really needs to be a better explanation of functional "patterns" and how to structure large functional programs before it will catch on more.

Also, it's easy to say, "object-oriented programming is bad for reuse," but that's not all OO is for (i.e. encapsulation, etc.).

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I'd have to go back through the literature, but reuse was not something I heard talked about much at all when I first seriously started doing OO in the 90s.

With that said, reuse with OO today is not in a horrible state, no pun intended. Things can certainly be easier, but I think design is the bigger issue. And the problems I see suffer in functional designs as well as OO designs.

I'd have to go back through the literature, but reuse was not something I heard talked about much at all when I first seriously started doing OO in the 90s.

Maybe it was an '80s thing, but I recall "reusable software components" being touted as the industry savior. OO was all about reuse then.

See Fred Brooks's "No Silver Bullet". If I remember correctly that was one of his hopes for OO...

Encapsulation is also addressed in the article. I really liked his response to that too, it was like a more succinct version of the Steve Yegge Wikileaks/Java private methods blog post[1] that did the rounds a few months back.

[1] - http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/07/wikileaks-to-leak-50...

> I think he has a good point, and as someone who really likes functional languages, I agree with him, but I think there really needs to be a better explanation of functional "patterns" and how to structure large functional programs before it will catch on more.

Are there any good existing resources for learning these things?

It's really hard to beat Hickey's Clojure Bookshelf, http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Bookshelf/lm/R3LG3ZBZS4GCTH. I've found the Standard ML books to be particularly illuminating as far as structuring functional code.

Apparently he reads those books while lying in a 'Presidential Cotton Rope Hammock' [1], which is at the bottom of his Bookshelf list ;-)

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Presidential-Cotton-Rope-Hammock-Size/...

It's a reference to this talk: http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586

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