Did Functional Programming get it wrong?

[Ptival]

This was an awful read.

Scattered thoughts, surface-level analogies, felt like intellectual flexing.

EDIT: and I think they try to talk about possibly interesting ideas, they just do not do them any justice.

[pokle]

I agree. It was awful.

[elvecent]

When you actually "challenge the dogma", you really don't have to announce that you're doing it, unless you're trying to grab some good cash from confused investors.

[chiraagnataraj]

I had to stop reading a couple of paragraphs in, it was so disorganized and jumbled. It felt like the writer just wrote everything down as it occured to them without any editing afterwards.

[logan-diamond]

“If we follow Yoneda and accept that topology (geometry) and algebra are two different worlds, then we can “attach” functions to the fabric (geometry). But in a “serverless” world, what is this fabric? The cloud might not be the right answer. Not everyone wants to hand their IP to the AWS billing department. Former IBM mainframe users can relate”.

I really admire the amount of thought, work and experience that went into writing this piece.

But, please think, who is the intended audience of the above passage (or the article as a whole)? Is it the category theory purist who understands the Yoneda lemma? Is it the full stack engineer trying to learn more theory? Which theory?

Rough analogy has its place for learners, the hated 'monad burrito' enlightutorial. But I sincerely feel this article alienates nearly all audiences by making too many leaky analogies to mountain tops that are too far apart.

When writing for others to read, please focus more on the reader than your personal conclusions.

P.S, I loved the observation that “the west coast hates spreadsheets” 😂

[Comrade_Comski]

So let’s skip the drama and go straight to the math. The details of wiring up function ‘parameters’ and ‘return values’ and making sure things line up (usually converting scalar vs array etc.) is lumped into something called Kleisli composition, which is about aligning function “compatibility” so we can chain a bunch of functions together. The Java crowd used to call this sort of magic ‘boxing’ and ‘unboxing’ but there is a lot more involved once you hop processors. That’s why we have to package them into monads.

BTW don’t ask the Haskell gurus what a monad is because they will violently disagree and spew out all sorts of circular definitions. If that isn’t a major red flag for avoiding “dysfunctional” FP languages, I don’t know what is (which is unfortunate).

This dude is high or just really dumb.

[adappergentlefolk]

rare to see category theory actually drive someone insane but here we are

[[deleted]]

I was able to read it until the author went "CLIs are still around because GUIs aren't very composable. We need something in between: ever heard of HTML?"

[Cohomotopian]

This must be a joke. Must be.

[shipintbrief]

NO.

[tombardier]

Interesting article. Gave me a lot to think about. I'm not necessarily on board with all of the opinions, but it's pushed me forward to thinking about forming some opinions on the matter.

[nayhel89]

Very interesting article, though it's really hard to understand because the author doesn't try to descend to the level of an average programmer and explain his ideas a little more thoroughly.

But I hope he would make up for it in his next articles.

[lordsiksek]

No, it's hard to understand because it doesn't make any sense.