Tony, I am curious on your attitude towards multi-paradigm and ML-like languages. I agree that functional programming is easily the better of the bundle in many forms of application logic and elegance (which is why I have come to love Scheme and Haskell), but do you see any room for those languages like F# or Rust which have large capacities for FP but are either functional-first (but not pure) or a hybrid? Brett Gilio On 07/12/2018 01:35 AM, Tony Morris wrote:
I used to teach undergrad OOP nonsense. I have been teaching FP for 15 years. [^1]
The latter is *way* easier. Existing programmers are more difficult than children, but still way easier to teach FP than all the other stuff.
[^1]: Canberra anyone? https://qfpl.io/posts/2018-canberra-intro-to-fp/
On 07/12/2018 04:23 PM, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
Am 11.07.2018 um 16:36 schrieb Damian Nadales:
I speak only from my own narrow perspective. I'd say programming is hard, but functional programming is harder.
Actually it's pretty much the opposite, I hear from teachers.
Maybe that's why Java replaced Haskell in some universities curricula The considerations are marketable skills. A considerable fraction of students is looking at the curriculum and at job offers, and if they find that the lists don't match, they will go to another university. Also, industry keeps lobbying for teaching skills that they can use. Industry can give money to universities so this gives them influence on the curriculum (and only if they get time to talk the topic over with the dean). This aspect can vary considerably between countries, depending on how much money the universities tend to acquire from industry.
https://chrisdone.com/posts/dijkstra-haskell-java. For some reason most programmers I know are not scared of learning OO, but they fear functional programming.
Programmers were *very* scared of OO in the nineties. It took roughly a decade or two (depending on where you put the starting point) to get comfortable with OO.
I think the reason might be that OO concepts
like inheritance and passing messages between objects are a bit more concrete and easier to grasp (when you present toy examples at least).
OO is about how to deal with having to pack everything into its own class (and how to arrange stuff into classes). Functional is about how to deal with the inability to update. Here, the functional camp actually has the easier job, because you can just tell people to just write code that creates new data objects and get over with it. Performance concerns can be handwaved away by saying that the compiler is hyper-aggressive, and "you can look at the intermediate code if you suspect the compiler is the issue". (Functional is a bit similar to SQL here, but the SQL optimizers are much less competent than GHC at detecting optimization opportunities.)
Then you have design patterns, which have intuitive names and give some very general guidelines that one can try after reading them (and add his/her own personal twist). I doubt people can read the Monad laws and make any sense out of them at the first try.
That's true, but much of the misconceptions around monads from the first days have been cleared up. But yes the monad laws are too hard to read. OTOH you won't be able to read the Tree code in the JDK without the explanations either. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.
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