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Comment by namank | Hacker News Reader

I am studying engineering, which is all about OOP. HN is making me so uncontrollably curious about the functional stuff!

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Keep in mind that functional isn't better or worse than OOP. What you see on HN is merely a reaction to the trend in the past decade (a trend still going on today) to teach OOP as the only de facto paradigm to use.

If Functional Programming was mainstream, everyone here would be raving about OOP and its benefits.

Ultimately what you want is to borrow the good ideas of different paradigms to create elegant and practical code.

To put it another way, OOP is a pretty nice hammer, but so many people have been using it to bash screws in (including ridiculous cases like concrete!) that others have reacted by using screwdrivers for everything (including nails). Pick the right tool for the job.

> Keep in mind that functional isn't better or worse than OOP.

Ah yes, the ol "it's all relative" argument.

if you're at all interested, I can't recommend (http://learnyouahaskell.com/) highly enough.

Would you recommend that or pg's On Lisp?

Learn You a Haskell. I found it easier to read and often thats what you need when your mind is being warped by the content.

Try it. Its not the silver bullet it sounds like when you listen to people rave about it, but it is worth learning.

Put it in your toolbox. You can apply functional concepts in basically any high-level language.

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