<story><title>You, Too, Can Be on the Cutting Edge of Functional Programming Research</title><url>http://prog21.dadgum.com/138.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>atdt</author><text>So the biggest benefit Hague derived from functional programming, by his own account, is that the headache it gave him crippled his zeal for clever tricks.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s a bit like making friends in a new language: when your tongue is tied, your interactions with others are sometime marked by this naive, disarming honesty that is charming and uncomplicated and utterly impossible to reproduce in your native tongue. It&apos;s sometime tempting to ascribe that to language itself, but it&apos;s not inherent to the language -- it&apos;s circumstantial. As you become fluent, shades of irony and evasion creep back into your speech.&lt;p&gt;Functional programming comes with its own bag of clever-clever tricks, and lack of familiarity will only stay your hand from them for as long as you lack familiarity. Ignorance is ephemeral. Contending with arbitrary handicaps may be formative, but it can&apos;t (and shouldn&apos;t) drive adoption.</text></comment>
<story><title>You, Too, Can Be on the Cutting Edge of Functional Programming Research</title><url>http://prog21.dadgum.com/138.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>discreteevent</author><text>One way of reading what he is saying is that if you are thinking of using pure FP for your application and it is not primarily a calculator (e.g. Jane Street) then be careful - nobody has proved that it will be quick to prototype, iterable, maintainable, understandable, flexible etc. Surely the academic community should feel more obliged to test their theories and follow things up further than toy examples or examples that match the paradigm exactly? What are they being paid for? In the meantime if someone does want to be at the cutting edge what would be interesting to see would be a word processor, a CAD program or a photoshop developed using a functional language (not a hybrid like Scala but something like Haskell where state is completely isolated using monads or whatever).</text></comment>