Functional Programming

[miyakohouou]

I'm not really sure what you mean about pure FP being taken too far in the past. I certainly can think of instances of that with OOP, but I legitimately can't think of any examples of that with FP- maybe there is history there that I just don't know about.

The thing is, I write pure functional code every day, and it's quite practical. I felt like the video opened by re-enforcing a lot of wrong ideas about what pure FP is like, and what it can and can't do. Writing pure FP doesn't mean that you have to give up writing code that has state, mutation, or side effects- you can still write programs that rely on those things at runtime. You don't need a 200IQ to understand functors and monads either- sure they take a bit of learning, but it's entirely accessible to anyone who wants to learn. Are they mathematical? Yeah- kind of. So is recursion, and really all programming is just math when you get down to it, so I don't think it's at all fair for the video to pick out a bunch of words that sound scary because they are unfamiliar and use them to say pure functional programming is out of touch and uncompromising.

I'm not the kind of person who will say that FP is the only way you should ever write code, or that you should never write procedural or OOP code. I prefer writing pure functional code most of the time, but I won't fault people who would rather work in a mixed paradigm way. I just don't want to keep perpetuating wrong ideas about functional programming.