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Comment by bradrn | Hacker News Reader

I feel I should point out that that ‘functional’ quote is (a) only applicable to pure, strongly-typed functional languages, and (b) pretty much irrelevant unless you happen to be interested in category theory.

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Yep, the FP scene is split into the pragmatic and the academic sides.

I think it is not precisely delineated along the static vs dynamic sides: In addition to Elixir/Erlang, and Clojure we have eg F# and Elm from the static side in the pragmatic team.

I think the distinction you’re trying to make is that of ‘impure’ vs ‘pure’; ‘pragmatic’ vs ‘academic’ strikes me as a rather loaded choice of terminology, especially since languages like Haskell are rather widely used practically.

I don't think that's the distinction fulafel tried to make.

Elm is very much pure, yet it's on the pragmatic side: it forgoes certain powerful abstractions (higher kinded polymorphism, type classes), which enables the compiler to give very helpful error messages, and makes the language easier to learn.

> Elm is very much pure

Huh… you’re quite right. I always thought it was impure. In that case I retract my previous comment (pity I can’t edit it any more!).

You might want to look a bit more closely before you write functional programming off like this.

Eg. Clojure is a modern functional language that is used for a lot of things & happens to be dynamic.

Since when was I writing off FP? My main language for personal projects is Haskell. I was just pointing out that the category theory stuff isn’t really relevant at all.

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