<story><title>Functional programming should be the future of software</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/functional-programming</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zamalek</author><text>Functional programming won&amp;#x27;t succeed until the tooling problem is fixed. &amp;#x27;Tsoding&amp;#x27; said it best: &amp;quot;developers are great at making tooling, but suck at making programming languages. Mathematicians are great at making programming languages, but suck at making tooling.&amp;quot; This is why Rust is such a success story in my opinion: it is heavily influenced by FP, but developers are responsible for the tooling.&lt;p&gt;Anecdotally, the tooling is why I gave up on Ocaml (given Rust&amp;#x27;s ML roots, I was seriously interested) and Haskell. I &lt;i&gt;seriously&lt;/i&gt; couldn&amp;#x27;t figure out the idiomatic Ocaml workflow&amp;#x2F;developer inner loop after more than a day of struggling. As for Haskell, I gave up maybe 20min in of waiting for deps to come down for a Dhall contribution I wanted to make.&lt;p&gt;Institutionally, it&amp;#x27;s a hard sell if you need to train the whole team to just compile a project, vs. `make` or `cargo build` or `npm install &amp;amp;&amp;amp; npm build`.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>agentultra</author><text>I think tsoding has the wrong idea here. Most mathematicians are not working on GHC or Haskell standards or even using Haskell. Most are still doing mathematics on pen and paper. Many use packages like Sage or Wolfram alpha. Few are using interactive theorem provers like Lean.&lt;p&gt;Haskell is a poor language to be doing mathematics in.&lt;p&gt;I’d say the majority of people working GHC are software developers and CS researchers.  They’re a friendly bunch.&lt;p&gt;What’s holding back tooling is that the developers of the de-facto compiler for Haskell are spread out amongst several organizations and there isn’t tens of millions of dollars funding their efforts. It’s mostly run by volunteers. And not the volume of “volunteers” you get on GCC or the like either.&lt;p&gt;That makes GHC and Haskell quite impressive in my books.&lt;p&gt;There are other factors of course but the tooling is improving bit by bit.&lt;p&gt;The whole “Haskell is for research” meme needs to go into the dustbin.</text></comment>
<story><title>Functional programming should be the future of software</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/functional-programming</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zamalek</author><text>Functional programming won&amp;#x27;t succeed until the tooling problem is fixed. &amp;#x27;Tsoding&amp;#x27; said it best: &amp;quot;developers are great at making tooling, but suck at making programming languages. Mathematicians are great at making programming languages, but suck at making tooling.&amp;quot; This is why Rust is such a success story in my opinion: it is heavily influenced by FP, but developers are responsible for the tooling.&lt;p&gt;Anecdotally, the tooling is why I gave up on Ocaml (given Rust&amp;#x27;s ML roots, I was seriously interested) and Haskell. I &lt;i&gt;seriously&lt;/i&gt; couldn&amp;#x27;t figure out the idiomatic Ocaml workflow&amp;#x2F;developer inner loop after more than a day of struggling. As for Haskell, I gave up maybe 20min in of waiting for deps to come down for a Dhall contribution I wanted to make.&lt;p&gt;Institutionally, it&amp;#x27;s a hard sell if you need to train the whole team to just compile a project, vs. `make` or `cargo build` or `npm install &amp;amp;&amp;amp; npm build`.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zelphirkalt</author><text>You gave up using a programming language after a day? And Haskell after installing&amp;#x2F;building some dependencies for 20mins? Tbh, this sounds like you were not really trying. What kind of experience with a programming language do you expect to have after a mere day? Learning takes time. Anyone might spew some not idiomatic code within a day, but really becoming proficient usually takes longer.&lt;p&gt;Do you have any references for the &amp;quot;Rust is heavily influenced by FP&amp;quot; thing? To me it does not feel that much FP. I have (for now) given up writing FP like code in Rust. ML-influence -- Yeah maybe, if I squint a bit.</text></comment>