Ask Slashdot: Do You Like Functional Programming? (slashdot.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Functional programming seems to be all the rage these days. Efforts are being made to highlight its use in Java, JavaScript, C# and elsewhere. Lots of claims are being made about it's virtues that seem relatively easy to prove or disprove such as "Its use will reduce your debugging time." Or "It will clarify your code." My co-workers are resorting to arm-wrestling matches over this style choice. Half of my co-workers have drunk the Kool-Aid and are evangelizing its benefits. The other half are unconvinced of its virtues over Object Oriented Design patterns, etc.

What is your take on functional programming and related technologies (i.e. lambdas and streams)? Is it our salvation? Is it merely another useful design pattern? Or is it a technological dead-end?
Python creator Guido van Rossum has said most programmers aren't used to functional languages, and when he answered Slashdot reader questions in 2013 said the only functional language he knew much about was Haskell, and "any language less popular than Haskell surely has very little practical value." He even added "I also don't think that the current crop of functional languages is ready for mainstream."

Leave your own opinions in the comments. Do you like functional programming?

Comments

I like functional aspects not functional languages

[brian.stinar]

I got my master's degree with this guy, and I had to take a Haskell course, or seminar, every semester. I was, and still am, pretty terrible at Haskell.

However, what I attempted to learn helped my Python out a lot. Map and filter are two of my favorites, and the other functional paradigms are occasionally useful to me as an actually working, productive, programmer. I'm happy I was exposed to those concepts, since they tend to come in handy. Yes, everything is Turing complete, and you can accomplish the same things without functional programming, or without high level language, or without computers, but that doesn't mean they are all equally useful to solving the problem at hand.

I recommend everyone become familiar with functional concepts in some way, if only to make them more well rounded. I don't advocate writing your next web application in Haskell though...

The Haskell people are all over this already

[Anonymous Coward]

https://wiki.haskell.org/Game_Development

Re:It has its uses

[TheRaven64]

In C++14 in particular, lambdas with auto parameters dramatically reduce copy-and-paste coding. If you have a couple of lines of code that's repeated, it isn't worth factoring it out into a separate templated function (in particular, you'll often need to pass so many arguments that you'll end up with more code at the end), but pulling it into a lambda that binds everything by reference and has auto-typed parameters can reduce the amount of source code, while generating the same object code (the lambda will be inlined at all call sites).