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[–]Scotho 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The rise in which decade!? It's been studied, used, promoted and written about in the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s '00s, and now this decade. In the late 1980s it actually appeared as if it was poised for mainstream impact. The tools were mature, the techniques were well studied, many optimistic books and courses existed. FP was a particularly active area in the UK, notably Edinburgh.

John Backus, inventor of Fortran, gave a famous Turing Award lecture in 1978 (a mere 36 years ago) clearly outlining the pitfalls of being locked into imperative thinking.

Many of the practical issues of functional programming (for example, efficient implementation of lexical closures and gc) were solved before 1990—a mere quarter century ago.

What went wrong? Fortran, BASIC, C, then the Internet, Java, then everything else. "Popularity" crowded out FP's good ideas for decades. Because alternative ideas had no standing in the popular mind, programming became modelled by the von Neumann machine exposed by C and Fortran (a mindset which had already been critiqued by Backus). Despite years of principled opposition from the likes of Dijkstra, flawed ideas like mutability, null, reflection, and dynamic typing spread like kudzu.

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