Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? - Richard Feldman

Richard is a member of the Elm core team, the author of Elm in Action from Manning Publications, and the instructor for the Intro to Elm and Advanced Elm courses on Frontend Masters. He's been writing Elm since 2014, and is the maintainer of several open-source Elm packages including elm-test and elm-css packages.

[@stevenreddie9780]

Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? Because when someone wants to talk about FP they spend all their time speaking about OOP.

[@tommywalkie]

That's deep tho.

[@NgoWunKnows]

Similar to the way a program does exactly what your code tells it to do, the video does exactly what the title says it will do. The content of the video supports the title which itself can be re-worded as "why FP is *not* the norm" or conversely, "why OOP *is* the norm." What is it about OOP languages that make them popular? And on the other hand, what is it about FP lang's that make them unpopular? That's what the video is about.

[@SimGunther]

I think they're nested too deeply in their OOP hierarchies to be talking about FP

[@Palundrium]

@@NgoWunKnows Great way of putting it.

[@szeredaiakos]

There is a good reason why he never mentioned the history before ALGOL. Imperative and later OOP is a solution to the mistakes of FP in the context of business solutions.

[@praktexemplar8082]

As a system developer, I ask myself this question all the time. After all, most of the code I work with is either dysfunctional or non-functional.

[@02orochi]

That shits funny

[@torarinvik4920]

ROFL, underrated comment!

[@02orochi]

@Marcus - is it really tho

[@archmad]

@Marcus - we are in the matrix you dummy

[@abebuckingham8198]

@Marcus - The universe is not object oriented, our language is. It makes it easy to model real world problems in the programming language but there is nothing inherently natural about it. As he points out in the lecture it's often just verb first or noun first notation, which differs from language to language.

[@paulwwells]

I've only worked with OO for the last 30 years so I was hoping to hear why Functional should be the norm.

[@USONOFAV]

You can use OO and FP at different granularity. Use OO modeling to find the right places in your application to put boundaries. Use FP techniques within those boundaries.

[@Sladeofdark]

Well said. This is what I have thought about always. I hate that 'geek' debate of FP vs OOP. It is stupid. It is like saying you should do alot of addition instead of a little multiplication.

[@ememes12]

@@Sladeofdark un o

[@AmexL]

@@Sladeofdark that’s a good analogy

[@D4no00]

what you are talking about makes no sense, OOP idea to use methods that produce side-effects to change the internal state of the object is completely against pure functions from FP. I can only guess what you mean by OO modeling are data structures, that are already present in FP languages.

[@em_the_bee]

@@D4no00 that doesn't mean you're forced to mutate state with every method you write

[@feraudyh]

Because there are lots of arguments. That's a pun, by the way.

[@PatrickPoet]

Is it? A pun exploits different meanings of words, which you've done brilliantly, but it doesn't seem to turn toward humor in this case. I'm not sure. I've argued myself from one point of view to the other and back again several times. It's a pun.

[@feraudyh]

@@PatrickPoet well, the problem of a huge number of arguments can be a turn off. That was the main point. By the way I come across the problem in Prolog too.

[@bennykokmusic]

This made my day

[@aoeu256]

Implicits, records, and "lifted functions" can hide the arguments though. There are three types of lifted functions/functors : Applicatives, MonoidApplicatives (Monads), and Arrows so yeah it can be hard to pick... Oh yeah there are Comonads, ArrowChoice, MonadFix, ArrowLoop, as well...

[@mechanicalmonk2020]

@@PatrickPoet what a rollercoaster ride this comment was.

[@herrfriberger5]

A simple answer: Because most programs (games, editors, browsers, etc.) are basically *state machines* (not simple "computations"). They therefore fit the old imperative modell better, and without all the complexities of handling state in functional languages. Pure functions sure have their places though, but as local structural elements in that mainly imperative code, not as a dogma. (Regarless of whether you use any OO or not.)

[@CrimsonTide001]

Exactly. Imperative languages give explicit control over state where-as functional give only implicit control. Since a program is far more than just a mathematical formula, state is king.

[@salvatoreshiggerino6810]

​@@CrimsonTide001 There's no real benefit to having explicit rather than implicit control of state for any of these applications, all it gives you is more rope to hang yourself in terms of bugs, especially when you're dealing with shared state. The real reason why imperative programming is the norm is that historically compilers haven't been readily available, affordable and sophisticated enough to give you the functional programming and still get good enough performance. But that is no longer the case.

[@CrimsonTide001]

@@salvatoreshiggerino6810 No, its because programs are fundamentally about manipulating state, and imperative gives you better tools to do just that. And in no way would I ever want to deal with shared state in a functional language in any real application. The mess of pseudo-functional but not really pure functional data structures I'd have to use would be mind numbing. FP has only one thing going for it, job security.

[@salvatoreshiggerino6810]

@@CrimsonTide001 Programs are fundamentally about transforming an input to an output, the manipulation of state is just an irrelevant implementation detail. Imperative programming has only one thing going for it, a legacy workforce.

[@CrimsonTide001]

@@salvatoreshiggerino6810 Not at all. Simulations (games, movies, scientific research), desktop apps (words processors, excel, email, internet, CAD/CAM, drawing/3D, any media authoring tools), media applications, etc... the vast majority of programs written are not about data transformation, but rather about data manipulation over time. The 'over time' part is of utmost importance. It is what separates computer science from mathematics. Any program that accepts input from a human is inherently state based. Whether that's playing a game, or writing a document, or surfing the web. As the input comes in the state of the program has to change to represent the new view of the data. Only the most simplest of programs, one's with zero user interaction, map well to FP. The way FP gets around this is using state based data structures, which is silly because they like to pretend there is no state, then admit that 'yeah I guess there is', then mess around with suboptimal and stupidly unwieldy constructs to try to shoehorn state into a system that wants to pretend it doesn't exist /facepalm. FP programmers are just in denial. Its not hard to grasp the concepts despite how hard they go out of their way to obfuscate the most simplest of tasks (seriously, look up any explanation/definition of monads, one of the simplest of constructs and yet its impossible for it not to be described/explained in the most ridiculous and hard to grok terms imaginable). They're just intentionally making the whole thing difficult, then run around claiming they're 'true programmers' for doing everything the hard way. Sure, running a marathon with 1 arm tied behind your back is possible, but unnecessarily difficult. State management is the single most important aspect of programs, which is why imperative has always won over functional. It has nothing to do with tools, or legacy workforce, or difficulty of understanding, or any of the other nonsense. Its because FP sucks.

[@The8merp]

I wish he spent even a fraction of time on explaining how FP is good or how it helps and is worth using

[@lepidoptera9337]

He can't do something that can't be done. He is not Jesus.

[@ChaoticNeutralMatt]

@@lepidoptera9337 I mean that implies it's bad, which it's not.

[@gigatesla]

@gsdcbill Don't worry about it, I misread your comment.

[@archmad]

you missed his point. OOP languages went through the roof not because they are OOP. Same thing you can see the FP. It will go up not because it is FP.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

@@archmad Precisely, and Python proves that a language doesn't even have to be decent to be hugely popular. It could have been a much, much better programming language if the developers actually knew what they were doing when they designed it. Semantic white space is one of the dumbest ideas ever, not to mention the fact that in versions of Python I've looked at require hackery if you don't want to print text without ending with a line feed and/or carriage return as appropriate to the OS. Every other language that I've messed with either made you add a linefeed to the end, or had a way of printing both partial and complete lines. The whole business of having to do the entire line at once is rather dumb and a bit of a pain sometimes.

[@Domanost]

20 minutes in and I don't have a clue what functional programming is yet. Got an history lesson in popularity.

[@TheDdm1234]

Yes exactly!

[@johnnyhane6337]

To be fair that's the subject. It's not "functional programming is awesome", it's "why isn't it the norm". Most of that explanation is why OOP is the norm instead, which is a history lesson in popularity

[@urbaniv]

Python also had a killer app in the last years: ML and AI in general. It worked out for them to jump on this train early and become the defacto standard language for this usage.

[@Falangaz]

urbaniv The interface to users is, under the hood all these Python deep learning packages are much lower level languages

[@urbaniv]

@@Falangaz exactly right... Great killer app ;-)

[@anthonylosego]

Don't forget Blender.

[@NothingMoreThanMyAss]

Python was still very popular way before ML got hyped though. I don’t think “ML and AI in general” to python is the same level of parity than say swift and iOS

[@asdfghyter]

@@NothingMoreThanMyAss NumPy and SciPy are also great killer apps for Python which made it popular as a replacement for Matlab in scientific computing. These were part of the what made ML in python popular.

[@januhlir7800]

You missed the main point why the top 10 is how it is - all languages there **hybrid**. They are not obsessed with style purity but rather pragmatically adding what users wanted. OO was just a popular style at that time, so languages got some features supporting that style, some more, like Java and C++, some much less, like JS or Go. With languages it is like with sales - you sell what users want, sometimes with some help of paid or coincidental marketing; you do it consistently over longer period of time, and voila - language is popular! No magic in there. I suspect that relative failure in of pure FP languages proliferation is exactly because of their purity. Arguably most successful FP is Scala - a multi paradigm language by their own definition. I would predict that FP languages impact will remain only indirect - by inspiring the mainstream hybrid languages. When they absorb enough FP features, and you can program in them FP style with ease, there would be hardly a rational reason to switch to any pure FP language for any project.

[@danyfedorov3029]

Good point! He didn't mention this by calling them hybrid, but I think he meant it when he talked about familiarity and how features were inherited by new languages from old popular ones.

[@CO8848_2]

This is so right on the spot. I learned LISP long before any object oriented language. I will say this “pure function” mentality is quite self-defeating. State handling in pure functional paradigms are a clunker and really unsuitable for a lot of situations. The purists are what’s preventing functional from being used more.

[@ChumX100]

"Practicality beats purity." -The Zen of Python

[@crides0]

True. After I discovered FP and learned a bit of Haskell, I was thinking of the same thing. We need to be functionally imperative. Iterators, high order functions, algebaric datatypes are good, but impractical and ancient math theories are just overkill and don't suit the time well.

[@matthewtanous7905]

Speaking as a Ruby/Rails developer, while I love the FP style support the language allows, I find sticking to a "pure" FP style would make my work a lot more difficult. There are times when I actually do want to have the capability to mutate state, and many, MANY times where "mutate object/collection in-place" saved me a TON of compute time and memory.

[@SilverAura]

Alright so first impressions, this guy did a FANTASTIC job preparing for this speech, because he literally had himself mentally prepared for a lackluster response right from the get-go and knew exactly how he wanted to play it out. Just literally kept rolling. I mean that's genuinely inspiring and makes me want to listen even further.

[@unperrier5998]

he was well prepared but he bluntly avoided the elephant in the room: FP is hard, python and Java is easy. This is the main driving force behind most of the popular languages (add to this that Javascript is the language of the web)

[@heroe1486]

​@@unperrier5998 Go isn't on that list although it's probably the simplest capable language tho

[@samphunter]

@@unperrier5998 Yeah, while it was a well made talk, I would title it "FP enthusiast struggles to cope with reality". He also makes a good case of why support of FP in OO languages is useful and the way to go. There are many partial issues that can be solved best with FP. But in reality, most large SW don't run for a determinate amount of time and then give a single result but are interactive systems. And by definition, such systems have to have side effects. Their entire purpose is to have side effects. So strict FP only languages have no mainstream future because of this IMO. He makes a good case of why inheritance as is does not have a future and Rust for example limits implementation inheritance since it is not a good pattern.

[@jeremyinvictus]

@@unperrier5998This is basically what I'm always saying to myself when I hear people lament OOP. When I was going through the wringer and first learning to program, finding OOP helped me wrap my head around what was going on.

[@Tagglink]

I don't think FP would be considered as hard if history had been different in the way he proposes. I've seen plenty of people learning programming for the first time and having difficulty wrapping their head around what a 'class' is, myself included. Look at it another way: the reason we still use OO languages is because that's what most educations teach. What if those educations taught FP instead?

[@TrevorFlorence]

I'm surprised this focused so much on the OO nature of the most popular languages rather than the fact that they're imperative.

[@coldsteel2105]

It's because we were taught that OO is the future and the way to go. I think the reason is that functional programming isn't the norm is that C/C++ was known for being low level and fast since it's inception. The majority of programmers need performance, so they just automatically use C. Since the majority of programmers know C, languages that work similarly to C/C++ have gained popularity faster. Rust is gaining popularity fast, because it offers the performance of C, while being more logical and strongly typed than C.

[@Nik6644]

@@coldsteel2105 humans also think unimpressive terms (most of them do anyway). You could easily teach a non programmer python but good luck with haskell

[@coldsteel2105]

@@Nik6644 I can tell that you've never tried Haskell, if you think it's hard to learn. It's easier to learn and read than Python. It's true that any programming language, including Haskell, can be written in a way that's complicated and hard to read.

[@danieldeelite]

@@coldsteel2105 , you can't tell shit about what other people have done. Your opinion isn't the same as other people's experiences. I'm sorry people don't use your language, but pretending you're a mind reader or that your experiences means others are the same don't make a good programmer.

[@martijnp]

@@coldsteel2105 I don't think at all that that's the reason why. Most of the people programming C are directly in the hardware industry. Since C is such a simple and efficient language they can run on rather small chips that are cheap to make. There are only very few chips even capable of running languages like Java that also don't skyrocket the price. Within general app, website or software development C is rarely used for anything since it's way too low level and people's devices are good enough to warrant the overhead when compared to development prices. Nobody except for game developers program things meant for actual computers on C or C++. A bit of evidence for this is the popularity of C#, that language offers a lot out of the box when it comes to app development, and is actually used a lot in the industry. FP has it's places for sure, but mainly in hardware development these days. And the truth is, most developers arent in the hardware industry.

[@derekgeorgeandrews]

Every once in a great while, I watch a video explaining what a monad is. Now having worked in the field 12 years, I can confidently say, I still have no effing clue what a monad is.

[@SeverityOne]

25 years here, and I can state with a great deal of certainty that a monad is something you don't need if you simply do OO,

[@purpleice2343]

We also could do away without monads if we used real english words with easy to comprehend descriptions of said words that don't take post-PhD math studies to start grasping. We are programmers, not mathematicians. Imagine if welders had to have PhD in physics and chemistry to fucking weld two pieces of metal...

[@SeverityOne]

@@purpleice2343 Um... Yes, we ARE mathematicians. Programming is just a branch of mathematics.

[@derekgeorgeandrews]

From reading wikipedia, my dumb brain wants to distill monad to this: "A monad wraps real world side effecty code in a function that returns a value so the rest of your pristine functional code can pretend the real side effecty world does not exist." Is that approximately right or did I miss something?

[@SeverityOne]

@@derekgeorgeandrews It's pretty accurate, but you have to admit that using words like "monad" makes you look cool to your fellow functional hipsters.

[@Essoje]

This talk reminds me of the dangers of Maslow's hammer and why programmers should seriously consider having at least a basic understand of a few programming paradigms and different programming languages, specially conflicting ones. So "Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm?" Because having multiple and/or multi-tools at your disposal and knowing how and when to use each (like we have now with programming) is the real best way to do things in life in general.

[@lepidoptera9337]

That's one reason but not the main reason. It will, however, take at least a beginners' class in computer science to understand that what you write into your program has little to nothing to do with that your CPU actually does. The compiler transformations that are between the high level code and the executable have side effects that experienced programmers understand, fear and use. Only amateurs are ignoring them.

[@Essoje]

@@lepidoptera9337 You understand that you are basically saying "the main reason is because people don't understand their work environment, and thus, are not making good use of the tools at their disposal", right?

[@lepidoptera9337]

@@Essoje That's the reason for a lot of bad stuff in the world. Having said that, try to go to your boss and tell him "Boss, the thousand hours of refactoring that we just put into the code base are basically all just an exercise in creative comment writing. The compiler removes the objects anyway and makes spaghetti code.". While technically correct, it will certainly not get you that raise that you were hoping for. Your boss might even know all of that, but he has a boss who usually does not. And therein lies the problem. I ran into a similar problem at work once. One of my companies was making test and measurement equipment and I asked why they are not making power supplies, since Hewlett-Packard at the time was making like 400% profit margins on theirs. The answer was "Nobody is going to buy brand X. If you are a manager on a factory floor and you replace HP power supplies with ours to save a couple hundred bucks and one of our products fails, then you need to look for a new job because you just caused thousands, if not millions of dollars of losses. If the HP supply fails then you can simply say "We always use those and they were always very reliable.", whether that's true or not.". Such is the world. Having said that, it still pays to know what a compiler does with your code, even if you are the only one at work who does or who cares about the consequences.

[@k98killer]

@@lepidoptera9337 The main reason for refactoring code imo is to make the code less unmaintainable after several months/years of unrestrained scope creep. Everything starts off with a definition and suitable structure, and then it snowballs from there because the original definition/design was inadequate. Maintainability has nothing to do with what your compiler does.

[@lepidoptera9337]

@@k98killer That's what I said... it's code documentation. It's entirely for the benefit of the programmers. Neither the compiler, nor the CPU nor the users care the least bit.

[@legistrate]

I think that some of Python's success could be due to adoption in scientific communities and boosted by the 'killer app' of Notebooks. The Functional Programming style may end up getting a boost from applications implementing microservices where many services use an event bus and immutable data change objects to synchronized, and frontend state management that avoids mutation and side-affects such as React+Redux.

[@abebuckingham8198]

As a math guy the biggest selling point of Python was their robust support for functional programming. I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

[@thorwaldjohanson2526]

I think the success of python is the ease of use, no pre compile and very powerful modules like numpy, pandas, scipy etc. This made it super easy for researchers and scientists to hump in and get results without learning software development for 3 years.

[@woobilicious.]

@@abebuckingham8198 functional programming in python is pretty bad IMHO, stack limit, no tail call optimization, impure, and variable-variables, syntax pushes you towards for/while instead of map/fold, functions in Haskell are actually mathematical in nature (pure, all variables are constants), being able to do algebra on types / values without any gotchas is a huge cognitive deload.

[@perspective500]

Killer app for python is different for different communities and that is the true selling point of python

[@unperrier5998]

don't forget that scientifics are not programmers. Python is popular in machine learning because it's like writing English. FP on the other hand is hard.

[@gljames24]

We aren't moving from OOP to Hybrid to FP, we are just moving to Hybrid because OOP is a useful tool. You mentioned C with classes didn't take off until after they added even more features and made C++, but that doesn't mean if it didn't have classes it would still take off. It could have required both classes and additional features to take off like all of the other useful hybrids.

[@thanasispappas62]

Are we really moving to hybrid though? I feel like that the vast majority of ppl still uses the OOP paradigm entirely

[@sacredgeometry]

@Felipe Gomes so the first day of learning oop? Maybe learn a bit more and you will realise that polymorphism is not only not bad but nothing to do with oop

[@opposite342]

@@sacredgeometry I mean technically if we are talking specifically overloading then yes since that requires inheritance

[@BobbyGandtheGmen]

@@sacredgeometry hmm. The course I studied in 1998 on OOP stated that the four characteristics of OOP were 1 Inheritance, Encapsulation, Polymorphism and Dynamic Binding. Perhaps all that has been rearranged since then. Yes?

[@JCAtkeson3]

Every few years the industry rolls out The Right Tool For Every Job. Throw out all your old tools, we're driving nails with a wrench this year and pounding bolts with a hammer the next. I use whatever code pattern fits best, and that can be anything at any time.

[@RalphH007]

I did miss him looking at FP to get an answer. It was too much of a 'FP is perfect already, the others are to blame'-speech.

[@barongerhardt]

Yep, it was like asking "why am I not rich?" then focusing on how other people are rich.

[@purpleice2343]

Also, FP is opposite of perfect. It's main issue is community. Try learning Haskell and after they throw a bunch of quasiintellectual words that could be done without to explain exact same thing so everyone understands, you will know why most people don't give a fuck. I didn't set up to learn something just to be told that I need PhD in math theory to understand why you avoid multiparadigm languages and instead tell me of how great purity is while unironically using unsafePerformIO.

[@pierreyves.lebrun]

Simon WoodburyForget If you believe French is pure you’ll be disappointed learning it, the reason it is so hard to learn is because it is full of inconsistencies and grammatical exceptions

[@clv603]

@Lemo would you rather it be the ruble or yuan instead? People love shitting on world powers and geopolitics until they realize a power vacuum would just lead to another global power to take its place and thus becomes "subjected" to its influence instead. Kinda the whole reason why the US "keep interfering and influencing" don't ya think? If not the US, who'd you rather it be?

[@DarthFennec]

Well I mean it's true isn't it? Not to say that FP is perfect, but it has fewer problems than say OOP. The main reason people don't like it is because it's unfamiliar. And because FP language communities tend to be more arrogant and uninviting.

[@hulahula1083]

00:00:27 Richard Feldman: Why are things the way they are? It's complicated. 00:00:53 Richard Feldman: Outline 00:00:59 Richard Feldman: Part 1. Language 00:01:01 Richard Feldman: What languages are norm today. Top 10. No functional programming language. 00:01:42 Richard Feldman: How did they get popular. 00:02:05 Richard Feldman: 1. Killer apps. VisiCal to Apple II/Rails to Ruby/Wordpress & Drupal to PHP ... 00:06:21 Richard Feldman: 2. Platform Exclusivity. ObjC/Swift to iPhone sales / JS to web&internet user / C# to Windows&VS 00:10:21 Richard Feldman: 3. Quickly Upgrade. CoffieScript&TypeScript to JS / Kotlin to Java 00:13:27 Richard Feldman: 4. Epic Marketing. $500M Java marketing compaign in 2003 00:16:15 Richard Feldman: 5. Slow and Steady. Python story 00:17:53 Richard Feldman: Other Popularity Factors. Syntax/JobMarket/Community 00:18:46 Richard Feldman: Why are the most popular languages OO except C. 00:19:15 Richard Feldman: Part 2. Paradigm 00:19:39 Richard Feldman: Uniuquely OO features. Encapsulation = Modularity 00:35:35 Richard Feldman: They are OO because modularity is a good idea and they originally got if from OO by chance. 00:35:47 Richard Feldman: Part 3. Style 00:35:50 Richard Feldman: FP Style : avoid mutation and side effects 00:36:31 Richard Feldman: Why isn't FP style the norm? No sufficiently large 'killer apps' / No exclusivity on large platforms / Can't be a quick upgrade if substantially diffeerent / No epic marketing budgets / Slow & steady growth takes decades 00:41:02 Richard Feldman: OO languages are the norm not because of uniquely OO features. 00:41:32 Richard Feldman: FP style just need time to become the norm. 00:41:50 Richard Feldman: Questions. 00:42:03 Question1: How do you see Lisp fiting in is it a FP language or not? 00:42:21 Answer: Classifying a language is functional or not is kind of arbitrary, definitely very fuzzy and ultimately not as important as talking about the style and their support for the style like being able to avoid mutation and side-effects and still have a good experience. 00:44:03 Question2: How does performance factor into this. 00:44:26 Answer: Perfromance is not the key factor to the popularity of a language.

[@LowestofheDead]

Thank you so much

[@EcuadorianFlagShip]

Godly

[@chastitywhiterose]

You put a lot of work into that timestamp index! That will be helpful to many people.

[@MSDOS128]

I can't help but read his surname as Feynman every time I look at his name

[@subbuktek]

everyone is only interested in the timestamps. Nobody sees the irony!

[@ryanfranz6715]

The title should be “rough overview of the history of programming languages”

[@ryanmcgowan3061]

The reason OO became the norm is because if you want to program procedurally in a OO, you can. There reverse is not the case. In OO, you don't have to new up an object to make things work. You can use a static class as if it's a namespace, and go completely procedural. Under the hood, a static class is pretty much just a pointer to other pointers. If you wanted to store state and deal in objects in a procedural language, you're going to fight the language. There is a time for programming procedurally, and a time for programming concretely. I prefer having the full toolset at my disposal. It is odd to me that functional programmers are so evangelical about functional being "better". It's like saying a screwdriver is better than a wrench. Sometimes you need one, sometimes you need the other. If I want to build a fast http handler, I'll code procedurally. If I want to build a large scale app with layers on layers, and a FIFO queue batch handling 100s of complex commands that might take 10 seconds to parse, I'd like to keep it organized in my head as much like the domain as possible, and write my code like English. And English tends to utilize nouns judiciously.

[@atlantic_love]

Why are you saying that a static class is just a pointer to other pointers? Not saying you're wrong, but it does seem you're going off the rails to make some point.

[@ryanmcgowan3061]

​@@atlantic_love My point was that you can make a static class that contains functional methods, kept in an organized container of the static class, and whether you made a bunch of first class functions, or put them in a static class, they all end up pointing to some executable in the executable memory block. A method is not a pointer at the language level, but under the hood there's some memory address to the method in the executable code memory allocation that a class points to for that method. A static class is just putting those pointers in one accessible place.

[@robgrainger5314]

@@ryanmcgowan3061 I suspect you're confusing procedural methods in a static class, with functional functions, which are quite a different animal.

[@chudchadanstud]

The reverse is possible. OO tricks you into thinking Function and Data live in the same memery area. They don't. The compiler will literally convert it into a procedural program. In C they have handles which literally have the same purpose as fields in an object. In C++ your struct is literally the same size as a class with fields give or take a few bites for Object Header information.

[@joeswheat]

🥱SO many "I"s in this ramble. Who are you, again?😏

[@chrisharrel8837]

This talk should be called "The History of OOP" because it has nothing to do with functional programming.

[@rontarrant]

Very little, yes. I was hoping he'd at least explain FP so I'd know how they compare. From what I've read, FP just sounds like cramming all the data into a module and sub-setting functions into various other modules. Just about any language can do that... except maybe Eiffel.

[@RobBCactive]

But he was very sketchy on procedural and OO programming history. I watched it out of nostalgia

[@neeneko]

@@rontarrant And that tends to be the problem. OOP programers use FP all the time in general purpose languages. It isn't something that really needs dedicated languages unless you are working in some domain where you want to force the behavior for some reason. The big top 10 languages, the thing they share is not OOP, but general purposeness. Even if they are domain restricted like Javascript, they are about as far from one trick ponies as you can get.

[@squirlmy]

C'mon Ron. You're going to denigrate FP, while claiming not to even know what it's definition is? Look it up! Your statement sounds like jealousy. "I ain't need no learnin' fron sum one with a paper sayin'' P -H -D"! lol Functional programming attempts to bind everything in pure mathematical functions style. It is a declarative. Its main focus is on “what to solve” in contrast to an imperative style where the main focus is “how to solve”. It uses expressions instead of statements. An expression is evaluated to produce a value whereas a statement is executed to assign variables. I was impressed when in the 90s I saw someone debugging a LISP program while it was running. Try to do that in other languages.

[@unstablesun8179]

I want to get an Apple II now LOL

[@partlink1]

Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? because someone missed a ')' back in the 70's and only found it 30 years later

[@nazarm6215]

Good one lol

[@RobBCactive]

Just ] was invented a v. long time ago, so you could easily close all outstanding insane numbers of parentheses

[@sankamohottala6778]

That's below the belt mate!

[@clv603]

it was also in a 5000+ line file and about 35 developers have touched it over the years leaving it a house of cards no one wants to touch

[@johnb2572]

LOL

[@imadetheuniverse4fun]

I haven't done any research on this but I think Python has a "killer app" type thing going for it too. It started to take off when Data Science / Machine Learning started to take off, and it has by far some of the best tools for the job (the killer apps, so to speak). Numpy, Scipy, Pandas, Pytorch, openCV, and Matplotlib.

[@alexa.davronov1537]

Google is behind pushing python shit. No wonder.

[@AR0ACE]

Yeah, as a new programmer, I agree this drew me to Python. Another killer app so to speak was Jupyter notebooks, it was a very intuitive way to write, run, and test code.

[@alexa.davronov1537]

@@AR0ACE Pything is a piece of ***t. Don't use it.

[@nonono4160]

Yeah, python has several "killer apps" - Django, jupyter, library for ML stuff (written in C but locked to python because it returns mostly python data structs). The guy is wrong in saying that python is popular because of the design, since there isn't much of the design to speak of, it evolved pretty haphazardly.

[@jasincolegrove4798]

I would consider this ecosystem, not killer app.

[@AttilaTheDev]

I wonder what's next... Functional programming zealots knocking on my door, holding a brochure asking me whether I have a personal relationship with pure functions yet?

[@johngarzone6092]

@Eucalypticus if only both paradigms were Turing complete 😂😂😂

[@archmad]

weird is, OOP zealots did that and still doing it.

[@OMGclueless]

I think there are real weaknesses to languages with strong FP support: They model problems very well and make it easy to write correct programs, but they don't model machines very well. That's because machines have mutable memory, caches, and registers, and utilizing those things efficiently is how to write an efficient modern program. This is why I think languages that have first-class support for mutating variables and memory will always be important. I think ultimately performance is the hardest thing to get right in any programmer's day-to-day working. It's much easier to test for correctness than it is to test for performance. And especially with the advent of ML systems where more computation leads on its own to more correctness it's more important than ever to accurately and directly model the computation than it is to accurately and directly model the problem you're solving.

[@tanszism]

The unpayable cost of abstraction.

[@hieverybody4246]

This comment deserves a lot more likes. This is the fundamental reason no one wants to go pure functional: you can't go back when you need to map the machine closely. From what most people see, hybrid is ideal and solves real world problems best.

[@v_iancu]

Performance is not that of an issue these days, by the way, programs generated GHC Haskell compiler is as fast as Java code on some benchmarks, it's because of the optimizations it does.

[@hieverybody4246]

@@v_iancu "Performance is not that of an issue these days" Ok that's nonsense.

[@JanilGarciaJr]

Sorry, but I really, really, really doubt there are people here in this comment session than can write better code than modern compilers. And I think I haven't cared for language performance for at least 1 1/2 years at my job, in which I use an imperative language. IO, network and data structure are all more relevant, specially to performance. Not performance that would improve by changing programming paradigms, at least. Performance critical sections can be isolated and improve upon in any language. Even Haskell has great FFI for the scenarios you describe. Keep in mind the language most used for these "ML systems" is freaking Python, which even JS can beat up these days. Unless you work with real-time systems, video-games, system programming, embedded systems or mission-critical software (like airplane control systems), I highly doubt you're writing micro-optimizations everyday.

[@albarnie1168]

This is like one of thise religious events where they talk about signs of the time and stuff

[@bastardferret869]

Only there's probably more consentual sex being had at the religious events, oddly enough.

[@horseradish843]

It also includes taking near facts and twisting them to form a wrong conclusion.

[@Teekeks]

With a coworker who is obsessed with FP and Clojure: it really feels that way. Everything not FP is evil to him. I just stopped arguing because nothing comes from it that maybe clojure and FP is not the perfect solution for every problem.

[@aorusaki]

@@Teekeks facts

[@NaumRusomarov]

@@Teekeks same experience. everything that's not fp is evil and trash and must be rewritten in a fp language, ironically he almost never does the rewriting.

[@tropicaljupiter]

He's channeling his nervousness into high speed communication instead of tugging on his elbow and stuttering which I appreciate

[@akshitjain2867]

That's why I watched it at 0.75x

[@Sk0lzky]

Finally a video I don't have to listen to at 1.5x

[@joelazaro461]

@@Sk0lzky I watched at 2x anyway. I'm a busy man :)

[@raianmr2843]

that's called being excited lmao

[@neildutoit5177]

Went I learnt CS at university I was taught like OOP was to coding what the major and minor scales are to music. I was honestly led to believe that that was the only way to do it, save for maybe a small cult somwhere that still uses some other methods. It was presented as THE way we code. The end of history. I remember the first time I wrote functional code it felt like I was engaging in some forbidden heretical ritual. I remember feeling somewhat surprised that god had not struck me down with lightning for daring not to use a class.

[@jj-wp8dt]

That's really interesting, because my experience is drastically different. On my CS studies, we were shown, that OOP is definitely not the only way to go about programming. On the first semester we had Introduction to programming in C, which made me really like procedural programming. On the second semester we had a mandatory class called 'Programming Methodology', in which we learned the basics of functional programming, and later built an interpreter in a functional language.

[@neildutoit5177]

@@ShannonBarber78 University of Cape Town. And correct I did not. I got a BSc Mathematics. I took some cs and computer engineering courses as part of the credits.

[@Turalcar]

Major and minor scales are a perfect analogy because that doesn't even scratch the surface: Lydian, Locrian etc modes, Middle-Eastern music with quarter tones, just intonation and further down to the lower levels of music theory iceberg

[@Taskarnin]

Honestly I don’t even understand OOP. It seems so insane. Why do I have to fuck around with classes and crap when I can just make functions to complete specific computational tasks. Of course I am not a programmer by trade and most of my use for programming is making tools in matlab or vb script. I’m sure it makes more sense in scenarios where you need a “worker”? Still…

[@matswessling6600]

functional programming and OOP are NOT opposites. They work very well together.

[@RonanMcCabe]

The creator of elm-css recommending a CSS replacement as a killer app. The Elm community setting an example as always. Thanks Richard.

[@sakex]

I've always used FP with OOP, I think both can live together and complement each other.

[@Bratjuuc]

Do you use immutabilty or do you use other principles of FP?

[@eduardpertinez4767]

In my experience (mostly with) php most code has mixed FP and OOP without problems. Some structures make more sense as clear distinguishable objects, some others don't need to. So asking if FP should be the norm is like asking if HTML should be the norm instead of CSS. At the end, whatever suits you. Most of the times it makes more sense for you to add a class to the DOM and let CSS draw the things as they are supossed to. But sometimes you are faster or it makes more sense to simply style the DOM node without trusting on CSS. So... my guess is FP+OOP is the future.

[@DMurdock]

In OO, when they say prefer composition over inheritance , they didn’t mean no inheritance. That was quite a jump in the thought process of this presentation, I think. Inheritance still plays a big role in OOP even if you adhere to the composition over inheritance practice.

[@DMurdock]

@Felipe Gomes I'm pretty sure subtyping is an important element of object oriented design.

[@sacredgeometry]

@Felipe Gomes only if you are shit at programming. I think we might have found the problem.

[@hieverybody4246]

@@sacredgeometry Then what does the "I" in SOLID refer to?

[@toddmiller5046]

Inheritance is a much tighter coupling than composition. Software written with lots of inheritance is harder to navigate and modify.

[@DMurdock]

@@toddmiller5046 Yes, tighter coupling is the intention. If you want to couple a class to another class' behavior, then inheritance is a tool that you can use. People who hate inheritance are blaming hammers for destroying their screws. It's a tool, that is all. If you want someone to blame, look at your OOP educators who use inappropriate sample code that lead their students think that inheritance is the default state of OO code.

[@KipIngram]

He answers his own question at 43 seconds into the video. "There not any one nice, tight, simple answer." Carpenters don't do everything with hammers, or a screwdriver. They have a toolbox, and they select the right tool for the job. The same goes for computer languages - people who become emotionally involved with a single programming methodology are doing themselves a disservice, and when they stand up and advocate that practice they're doing everyone a disservice. There really is no valid argument to discount procedural / imperative programming. Computers are tools that follow instructions. Do this, do that, then do this other thing, etc. They're imperative / procedural by their very nature. I won't claim that style to be the nirvana approach either, but it's an essential item of the toolbox. I guess human nature could account for a person who's really only mastered one tool to want to make that the end-all be-all "nirvana tool." It just doesn't wash, though.

[@purpleice2343]

Exactly this. Most well written programs today will not be afraid to use sum types, as they're great, you will see iterators because they make your life easier, but they also will contain OOP where you need a state because using FP for that sounds like a nightmare.

[@mapleveritas2698]

Yes. For me, the language I use is mostly the language the system I support is written in. It is not an emotional choice. Heck, it is not even an intellectual choice. If I start a new system, what language will I program it in? Right now, it is Java. Again, not emotional at all, Java just happens to have the most supporting libraries that I can make use of without writing them myself. I was tempted a few times to use GO or Rust or C for the really time-sensitive portions of one of my systems. But once I removed the bottlenecks, I did not feel like I needed to go through the hassles to have multiple languages in one system. I did not consider C++, although I used it for quite a few jobs I had in my career. I find it easier to control a C program than a "naive" C++ programs. Some environments don't support C++ libraries because of memory constraints (yes, there are still devices and systems like that). And since most of them also don't have memory protection, a C program is actually easier to make reliable and robust than a C++ program. And I got sick of having to restart the device when the system crashed due to memory corruption. Just personal experience. I used to use Perl for throw-away programming, as I consider it a better shell for scripting. I started using Perl when I had to remember too many programs to write a simple shell script. I don't use Perl as much for that purpose any more, as CPAN is getting more and more outdated. So, I use Ruby instead for my build scripts, for example. For simple system scripts, Perl is the still the best, as long as I don't need too many libraries. I don't use Python if I have a choice. Now that is an emotional choice because I got one too many indentation wrong back in the '90s. After that, well, I still used it if it is warranted or when it is the language used (see the theme?) for the system I had to support. Did I hate using it? Not really. I would avoid it, that is all. Do I use functional languages? Well, I am still using (pure) Lisp, having written more than one Lisp interpreter for my own use. My extension language inside my systems is Lisp. I used SASL and Miranda back in the days. Love them, but too expensive to get a copy of my own. Late '80s, I believe. Heck, one of my first loves were SNOBOL 4. I just loved the pattern matching stuff. That is the reason XSLT is such a nice language to use for transforming XML. It just works tons better than any other alternative for that purpose. Swift is interesting. I like many aspects of it. And some aspects I can't stand. But that is the same for most languages I have to deal with. In short, languages are just tools. Yeah.

[@RicardoGonzalez-bx6zd]

Yes.

[@squirlmy]

@@RicardoGonzalez-bx6zd I don't think that explains the actual question. If the toolbox paradigm were correct, then there should be a functional language within the top ten somewhere. Maybe not the top three or five, but one should be somewhere near there. It's like asking why a literal toolbox doesn't have a wrench. "It's because I have all these other tools in my toolbox", that still doesn't explain why there's no wrench.

[@michaelrichter9427]

@@squirlmy If you view FP as a commonplace tool that's as universally applicable as a wrench, sure. But the thing is, most popular languages have just enough of the FP stuff in them these days that going whole-hog functional is rarely the best choice. So instead of a wrench, it's more like, say, a seven-axis CNC mill. Most of the time I'll be using hammers and saws and wrenches and routers and drills and such, thank you very much. The mill sits in the corner. But occasionally I REALLY need what that mill can do and doing it without the mill, while technically possible, is too difficult and the mill gets fired up. (Whole-hog) FP is like the mill, not like a wrench. (A language with some FP capabilities is the wrench.)

[@luck3949]

The biggest difference between circle.grow(3) and grow(circle, 3) is IDE hints. You don't need to remember names of functions in first syntax, you can just put a dot, and IDE will show what you can do with it.

[@tetrahedrontri]

The biggest difference is that in the second you're passing an object and the function doesn't have to have a reference of that object to do something with is, whereas if i had the following: grower.addThree(circle) This would break OOP's rules of encapsulation, because I'd be passing an object, not information about the object.

[@shinzon0]

tell that to people working in vim without any completion ;))))

[@karolrvn]

True, as of today. However one could imagine, e.g. writing `circle` and pressing smth, e.g. alt+enter and "show me the operations I can do on this object", which would be even better, because it would include cases in which it is not the first (or `this`) arg. CLOS multiple-dispatch polymorphism comes to mind.

[@dna1238]

Thank You Mr Feldman , vibrant talk , trying to get an introductory platform for programming and you kept me paying attention throughout the talk . Well delivered public peaking and transfer of information.

[@krccmsitp2884]

Good question. And even better answers. After programming mostly in C# for the last 15-20 years, I am currently learning F#. I also believe that functional programming will become more important and prevalent in the next years.

[@ViktorFerenczi]

Actually, Python had its "Rails moments" around 2012 with increased popularity of deep learning research and applications. It also coincided with widespread use in systems management and automation scripting.

[@KaplaBen]

And now it has a strong community around it with jupyter notebook / lab, numpy and pandas. It has become the default for many applications in science / statistics / data science

[@metalmolisher666]

@@KaplaBen Dont forget automation with a lot of easy to use packages that can handle most communication protocolls in the industrial ecosystem. Like CAN, Modbus, MQtt for the IIoT, .... The community provides almost anything to exchange data with almost every machine, motor whatever. Just XCP is missing. At least i couldnt find anything for my needs.

[@Luxalpa]

Similar thing could be said about C# which massively grew in popularity due to Unity3D.

[@mandisaw]

@@Luxalpa I do love Unity, but I think Microsoft had way more to do with the popularity of C#/.NET. Besides Windows desktop application programming, there was also ASP.NET which was very popular among enterprise web developers. MSFT saw themselves as being in a very real battle with Sun (later Oracle) for the enterprise market. You'll note that if C# & Java are combined (even with say 30% overlap), that they beat out even JS.

[@HermanWillems]

So you say Python has it's "Rails moments" as being a front-end language for high performant languages like C & C++ ?

[@zvuk]

I usually speed up the video when watching presentations, but at this video ... i couldn't

[@DeathBringer769]

Same. This guy already speaks at 1.25x naturally, lol.

[@foggs]

I had to check I didn't have it set faster

[@AttilaAsztalos]

I actually checked that he sound far more natural at 0.75x but since that is choppy...

[@nin3se]

I did watch this at 1.25 partly because his pronunciation is good. What I cannot speed up are British tv shows, tho

[@foggs]

@@nin3se QI needs to be watched at 0.5x

[@notalostnumber8660]

That's why I stooped thinking with languages entirely. I just go like “I want to make a math function” and punch in some bits into an executable file and it just works

[@pstanyer1]

I used COBOL for 30 years. Then needed to write some smaller simple stuff. Tried vb3 then 4 and 5 I was writing simple useful apps in minutes for customers who were delighted. I was destroying a team of writers with quick simple applications that weren't brilliantly written or superb disciplined written code. They just worked gave me living for another 10 years. Some cobol I wrote in 1984 is still running and some vbapps are still running 115 years later. Not because They are great but because they work and do a job in a simple and accurate way. Why there are no great visual languages now I do not know.

[@pedrovasconcelos8260]

Nice talk! However, one aspect that I think you've missed is that programming desktop GUIs was a "killer app" for OOP in the late 80s/early 90s. Inheritance works relative well with a fixed set of operations (the widgets events) that can be extended to many widgets (cf. Wadler's "Expression problem"). Of course it didn't work as well for other domains (e.g. for data structures parametric polymorphism of SML was much better suited) but the OOP adoption motivated by GUIs blinded the other alternatives for the next 20 years.

[@MrWorshipMe]

But now react, which is a pretty popular GUI framework, is becoming more functional with hooks replacing classes.

[@wlangstroth]

This x1000. Objects were a good solution for GUIs, given how state was managed in any of the systems of the time. It wasn't necessarily optimal for other problems, but because everyone was already programming for the GUI anyway ...

[@KuraIthys]

GUI work is one of those things you never realise how difficult it is until you've had to do quite a bit of it. I could reasonably make the case that the GUI functionality of a modern program could be as much as 20 times more work to implement than the actual 'functionality' the program is intended to accomplish. GUI code is SO tedious to write...

[@AttilaAsztalos]

So unless you buy into the contemporary "everything is a webpage" bullshit, when exactly did actually hooking up a GUI become any less important whatsoever, for any software that's not just running headlessly on a server back-end somewhere...?

[@MrWorshipMe]

@M. de k. Behind the scenes, there's no such thing as purely functional anything... Something has to generate side effects for things to happen... You don't consider the VM, interpreter or compiler - why should you care about the inner workings of a library when you should only be using its API?

[@RobertWinkler25]

Interesting talk, though as some mentioned, Python did get a boost from the ML/AI hype train the last 7 years or so. I've always thought that functional languages and the functional style have never (and maybe will never) become the dominant ones because the world and people and computers don't operate that way. I think most programmers have heard the quote "To iterate is human, to recurse is divine". Well, that's just another way of saying people don't naturally think recursively, they iterate, they get a list of directions of steps, do this, then do that and each step changes the state of the world. Similarly computers are basically really complicated state machines. A program by definition, changes the state of the machine, even an empty program that doesn't do anything useful, just immediately exit is still changing state under the hood. And while a functional style might give performance benefits in rare situations involving big data operations across multiple servers and things like that, in general most applications are much faster when written in a traditional imperative/procedural style. The classic obvious example is gaming or anything graphical because generating a whole new game state and frame buffer every 16 milliseconds rather than editing in place is prohibitively expensive. Another point that's been made before is a huge amount of programming is directly with the hardware, the bits and bytes o configuration and initiation, low level drivers, embedded microcontrollers, none of which are feasible to do in a functional style. Even if someone wrote an OS in a functional language in a mostly functional style, there's no way to go all the way, including the bootloader, firmware etc. Edit: I forgot 2 more factors that I think are important. One, it is much easier to reason about performance when dealing with an imperative C-like language than a LISP/Scheme like language. It is easier to reasonably guess what the assembly would look like (and even possible to do inline assembly in C/C++ etc.). Even if you can write equally performing functional code, the generated assembly is not something that you could easily guess or map to from the source. Two, it is much easier to edit an iterative, C-like block structured language. We edit code in lines and semantically the code executes line by line. We can easily insert or remove lines, even non-trivial chunks that add/remove/change significant behavior. To do the same thing in a Lisp style language might change the entire structure of the program/function or more likely several functions. Our textual editing and debugging tools map far better onto a line/block oriented language than a Lisp-y functional language. Whether you actually use a debugger or print statements combined with careful thought, it is far easier to do with C than Lisp. Granted there are functional languages that are more block like but it's a semantic problem too. The functional style of first class functions created and passed around willy nilly is harder to step through even if the textual representation is more traditional.

[@palepuaditya9370]

Thanks man. Now this explains why I struggled with learning FP on my first encounter. Everything is so complicated it felt like BlackMagic.

[@TaranovskiAlex]

Top comment! Thank you!

[@jackmurphy8696]

So would writing all your functions in a recursive manner be a great anti reverse engineering technique?

[@RobertWinkler25]

@@jackmurphy8696 Probably not. Serious reverse engineering is hard enough already that iterative vs recursive in assembly isn't going to make much difference to them, certainly not compared to far better obfuscation techniques. Just use the normal obfuscation techniques combined with the movfuscator if you really want to drive a reverse engineer to suicide

[@jackmurphy8696]

@@RobertWinkler25 I figured it wouldn't stop any of the good ones out there , but it would certainly stop me. That stuff is really hard. Thanks for this info.

[@jtnkathuria]

Brilliant talk with extreme clarity. I learned a lot. thanks.

[@davestorm6718]

C# was introduced in 2000, not 1995. Windows was primarily C++ and Visual Basic (Borland had a play in this, too).

[@vast634]

Its a derivative of Java / J++, so that's probably why he used that date.

[@rfvtgbzhn]

​​@@vast634at least according to Wikipedia the development of C# started in 1999 because the developers of the .NET framework had the feeling that they needed a new programming language. For some reason (maybe because Sun had sued them) at that point they decided to develop a new language instead of continuing J++.

[@TorstenSeemann]

Perl was king of the early internet; everyone used the CGI module.

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

As history goes, Perl is so well designed that Larry Wall decided to start from scratch for version 6.

[@MSStuckwisch]

​@@BrunodeSouzaLino The reason for starting from scratch was that between 1-4, maintaining backwards compatibility was starting to hold the language back, which isn't unique (see Python 2 -> 3). That said, if you haven't played around with Perl 6 (which is being renamed Raku to better distinguish it from Perl 5), you should take a look at it. Speed is finally mostly on par with other scripting languages and it handles FP very nicely (not surprising, given a lot of the improvements to Haskell came from P6's initial implementations that were done in Haskell, so developers were very used to the FP style)

[@HermanWillems]

@@MSStuckwisch That's mostly when you favor features and think not good about the future. That's why C++ succeeded. They really carefully wait a very long time for adding features and keep back compatibility a TOP priority. Never had to break C++ in order to go to the next version. Therefore C++ is superior. That's why people say: C++ MASTER RACE. Understand?

[@bra5081]

@@HermanWillems C++ obviously didn't start from scratch...

[@jessejordache1869]

I remember those days. That was around the time I invented AJAX without realizing it (I was trying to get around browser incompatibilities). Perl is a fantastic language. Even Lisp snobs won't criticize it.

[@Claxiux]

I'd say one of the main reasons for those langs being in the top 10 was that they are so easy to learn once you have one of them already. It's like learning another romance lang. after you know one. e.g. learning Italian after you know Spanish. On the other hand, functional programming is like going from spanish to hungarian.

[@LuisA-qm8om]

True, I've learned C++ and in I've learned on the fly all other languages when i used them.

[@corryunedited8154]

Learned BASIC in middle school & some Pascal in HS. Taught myself QBasic in the 90s. OOP is like learning that proverbial Hungarian for me. Fortunately, PHP works well as a procedural / functional language. It's only when I have to work with other people's code that I have to deal with the OOP paradigm.

[@Moltak111]

@@corryunedited8154 Procedural is not functional don't get them confused

[@Nik6644]

I learned Java and Haskell at the same time. Java was just so much more intuitive. People just think imperatively

[@MuantanamoMobile]

@@Nik6644 Speak for yourself. I learned Lisp first after really struggling to learn imperative languages. Lisp just felt natural and intuitive to me, I would spend countless hours as a kid just writing lisp on scraps of paper and whatnot even when I was on the bus or having dinner, then there was Haskell. I had less intense but similar experiences with Erlang and a few other functional ones. No imperative language has ever made me feel this way, and I wouldn't willingly touch any of that stuff in my downtime.

[@hansdietrich83]

What every speaker seems to miss when talking about C is embedded systems. Every small electronics decvice, that isn't running an OS is either programmed in assembly or C. Be it a toaszer or a sensor in a car or a washing machine

[@nickmaiorano296]

I think this talk omits one very important point about what makes or breaks a language: the end result. In other words, when using a particular language to build a reasonably-sized system, does the language work? Does it perform reasonable well or is it too slow and requires too many performance tweaks? Does the language have safeguards to catch errors at compile time to avoid production errors (e.g. static typing)? Does it have a decent eco-system of tools, documentation, and libraries to make me more productive? And finally, does it have a large enough community to share ideas and to keep improving it? When factoring in these considerations, Java scores very high. It’s not just “marketing” as this speaker seems to suggest. This is why Java is still running very strong 25+ years later. Put simply, the language has to “work” to become successful. Otherwise, we end up with Ruby or Scala and people move on.

[@Andrew-rc3vh]

It's all C++ in my world of Chinese microcontrollers. The annoying thing is learning too many languages so you mistake one language for another. You just need to know one good language well and then you don't think about it anymore and its as if you write in English where your brain is 99% on the way you design what you are building. All the other software people write is C++ as well, so you can just copy libraries and whatnot and not worry.

[@MorningNapalm]

@@Andrew-rc3vh Okay, you made me chuckle there, why would you copy a library? It is a _library_, you just use it. It seems to me that you are not getting the most out of your language.

[@Andrew-rc3vh]

@@MorningNapalm I often download libraries Github, especially the ones used to drive specific chips. Also another place is simply forums, often with code boxes on them. C is the language 99.9% use in the things I do. If it is not C, sometimes it is Lua, sometimes the odd Python file too.

[@PieceOfDuke]

I know for a fact that in the 80's my Dad was studying so-called structural programming at Moscow State University. No mutation, pure functions, all that stuff. It WAS the norm. At least there and then.

[@wordonice4457]

I think the speaker missed one major reason why FP style isn't the norm. Because, at times, it can get really weird and difficult to understand, especially for beginner programmers. At times. But not always. OO style has the advantage of accessibility, and honestly, that's very important to a lot of language creators / maintainers. Python is such a popular language because of its ease and accessibility. I also think the reason languages like Java adopted the FP style was to generally give programmers an avenue to write shorter, more compact lines of codes. But all in all, it is growing in popularity, and I certainly love it, that's for sure. I really do appreciate it.

[@Fogmeister]

I agree with your first paragraph. For me, I understood what FP was for a long time. I had read many many books and articles on FP. I had finished tutorials etc... But, I didn’t use it because I didn’t understand how to jump beyond the text books and tutorials. It was only when I started doing some things to fix a problem I had that I suddenly realised after a couple months that I was doing FP. Since then it has clicked with me and I use the ideas a lot now.

[@caty863]

This guy is a good public speaker indeed. I'm not a computer scientist or a programmer but I sometimes do some scripting although my preferred language, R, didn't make it to his list. Nonetheless, I like how the presenter guides us through the history of how these languages were developed and gives us the context in which the decisions that affect us when using these languages today were taken.

[@dispatch-indirect9206]

Unfortunately, R had a timing problem because the latter half of the 17th century was when a language for pirates would have been most successful.

[@caty863]

@@dispatch-indirect9206 How is *R* a language for pirates?

[@JaskierStark]

​@@caty863Arrrr

[@donovanwest2712]

This has "Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." vibes

[@closure4791]

Does it though

[@zokalyx]

@@closure4791 yes

[@geektarded]

Python has a low barrier of entry and seems to be the non-programmers’ and hobbyist programmers’ language of choice. With its large set of libraries, it allows them to focus on solving their problems in math, statistics and AI instead of requiring them to become proficient at software development.

[@MorningNapalm]

Unfortunately the price is that it is extremely difficult to do great software architecture in Python, without a superhuman effort and dollops of discipline.

[@billybbob18]

Python is far too slow in the way it runs for general use. I could write sloppy C code which could still far outpace Python. Python will probably reside mostly in academia. It's easy to learn and quick to write. When you need fully optimized code, C or assembly will likely be the best option for many years to come. I write code for microcontrollers so I'm obviously biased. If you want one answer quickly, choose python. If you need many answers quickly, choose C or ASM.

[@hieverybody4246]

Python is also huge in the second and third world, where education is not as great and Java and C# are not popular. A lot of this is because they don't speak much English there, and tutorials for the most popular languages here are in English. I've had personal experience with this, trying to help people in former Soviet countries learn the languages I know. In the end, Python was much easier for them just because most universities there don't even have a programming major, just basic IT work.

[@monkemode8128]

​@@billybbob18 I think for small-medium scale systems, things like business CRUD applications, Python or a similar language can make a lot of sense. A small scale CRUD application might only take $500 a month to host, but developers in the USA cost like $10k a month.

[@nonono4160]

Nah, python has REPUTATION for having low barrier of entry. There is a big difference. Language with low barrier to entry would be something like Go. Python is actually a lot more complicated, less predictable and with more non-obvious behavior.

[@cakep4271]

8:20 - No one knows why flash died? I can tell you EXACTLY why flash died. It died the day chrome made flash disabled by default. I'm in the ad industry and when chrome did that, the entire industry switched from flash to js overnight.

[@christianbarnay2499]

Flash died because it was designed as a temporary workaround that would die once JS was finally standardized. Since the early days JS was the future of the Web but it's adoption was slowed down by a stupid war between IE and Netscape teams who decided to systematically implement each method slightly differently and with a different name. So any JS code from that time consisted in 2 copies of the same code, one for IE and the other for Netscape. While that stupid battle was ongoing, people who wanted truly inter-operable and easily maintainable code resorted to create a few workarounds to replace JS in areas were it was lacking or unpractical. Flash was one of them along with Java applets, and a couple other third-party modules. Now that everyone has finally agreed to work together on a single standard JS implementation, all those workarounds are no longer needed.

[@christianbarnay2499]

@Svein Are Karlsen The programming language is not responsible for bad coding practices by some amateurish plugin developers or web site creators who don't care about memory usage because the code executes on the client PC instead of their lovely server. Neither for the ad-based economy of many web sites that are cluttered with banners and unskippable commercials. First tip to reduce browser memory usage is to install an ad-blocker. You'll benefit on memory usage, loading time and readability on most web sites. After that if a single browser tab uses several gigs of ram, find another less memory hungry web site that has the same info with less strain on your computer. If all your tabs are affected deactivate all plugins and reactivate them one at a time to identify the crappy ones and look for alternatives. I have about 20 tabs constantly open for several weeks, some with video and various memory intensive dynamic content, plus a dozen plugins that add overhead in each tab. And even with all the memory leaks that built up over time the total memory footprint of my browser is less than 2GB.

[@RialuCaos]

Flash not running on iPhones or any of Apple's products was also a significant factor as to why it became abandoned. And of course, the reason for this lack of compatibility was primarily motivated by corporate rivalry.

[@cakep4271]

Flash had a specific nitch for creating vector based graphic animations with extremely small file size. spec standard for banners was 40k and we used to fit pretty complicated stuff into that size with animated cartoon characters and such. The new js banner standard spec started at and still is 200k, and the animations are extremely simple compared to what was happening in the flash days, because still after all these years nothing even comes close to flash's ability to quickly create advanced animations in very small files. The fact flash didn't run on mobile was fine. Mobile is always a separate build anyway: simpler, smaller dimension ads, or quite often just static images. The nitch of easily making fun cartoony like content for the web died when flash did.

[@RialuCaos]

@@cakep4271 Perhaps not being accessible on mobile was fine at your company, but at the company I worked at it was reason enough to switch every future project to JavaScript.

[@aplanosgc6963]

A kind hello from France, where we use the functional modular dinosaur that is OCaml. This old man was created by the computer science branch of the French national research center back in 1996, and is teached to a good part of french computer science students. All to say that when I saw this video, I was like : "Wait, FP is quite popular though, isn't it ?"

[@ZettaiKatsu2013]

Ce fut très frustrant pour moi de ne pas pouvoir sur une communauté d'utilisateurs (en dehors des profs...) pour comprendre la PF.

[@kuklama0706]

Scialuppe a mare!

[@GeneralKenobi69420]

Pareil quand j'ai fait ma licence info a Strasbourg

[@Ruskieit]

In Italy as well, it is used in University. At least the one I attended

[@TheArcV]

How about that procedural languages have a greater similarity to how thought processes seem to work and are thus more natural for people to use.

[@BrightBlueJim]

Not just that, but all hardware instruction set architectures are procedural. So when translating from how people think to how computers work, functional languages are a complete non-sequitur.

[@altus3278]

Maybe they have more similarity to *your* thought process. I think pure FP would appear more natural to someone with a stronger mathematical background.

[@TheArcV]

@@altus3278 Good point. Nevertheless, since the core digital computer concept (von Neumann architecture) is procedural and also created by an extraordinary mathematician, pure FP might not necessarily appeal as an obvious first choice, even if one is one of the great mathematicians. However, someone like John McCarty is a great example (Lisp inventor).

[@aure6898]

I mean there is no denying that a language like C is closer to the hardware than any FP language can ever be. And that's because C is a very close representation of how hardware actually works. I remember Linus Torvalds once saying he loves C because when he reads C, he can deduce what actually happens on the hardware. You'll always need a translation layer that converts any FP language into a procedural one, simply because a computer is a state machine, and FP languages are not a state machine. Thus it's just easier to write a program in a procedural language like C and understand what will actually happen on the hardware (if you care about that).

[@FROZENbender]

I don't get this. I don't at all think procedural languages are closer to thought processes but maybe it's different from person to person. I can much easier keep track of objects, how they relate to eachother and what they can do in my head than a strict order of operations. The latter is what the computer does and my brain is not a computer.

[@markemerson98]

Love it: “out of slowwhere” gonna pinch that phrase

[@morthim]

slow-ware

[@becomepostal]

morthim nope, it’s slowwhere in "out of slowwhere", like "out of nowhere".

[@HavardSlettvold]

@@becomepostal /r/whoosh

[@gum8191]

I'm gonna pinch you for being such a dorkwad.

[@deViant14]

It is a funny joke although after "functional javascript" would have been better comedic timing

[@johnforde7735]

Why would you want an FP-only language when a hybrid language gives you the best of both worlds. If you choose an FP-only language, you lose out.

[@axeman2638]

because these people are religious zealots, not practical programmers.

[@migkillerphantom]

Why don't you mix your chocolate icecream with shit, it's just a little bit of shit, surely that's fine?

[@vertie2090]

"Hybrid language" means basically any OOP lang that markets themselves as "Multi-paradigm language". Meaning that it has basically zero facilities for functional programming.

[@johnforde7735]

@@vertie2090 Not at all. For example, Swift is fully an OOP as well as having all the facilities of a functional language.

[@quangtung2912]

OOP features sometime conflicting with FP's. For example, I can not imagine how interfaces (like in Java) can coexist with type classes (in Haskell, or Traits in Rust). And how can both Algebraic Data Types and Inheritance be working nicely together. So I dont think Hybrid is always a best ideal.

[@filobloomz]

I had difficulty reading lisp code when I first approached the language - Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp. In english we are taught to read from left to right, and then down. Reading lisp requires us to find the middle, or innermost, function and then read the code in an outward fashion - i.e read up, down, and outwards from the center until we reach the outermost containing or "top-level" functions. It's disorienting to the eyes to have to dance around the page in this manner. The silver-lining is that you CAN get used to it and it becomes natural after awhile, but you have to C-/ or at-least adjust your left-to-right-and-down approach to reading text

[@NoBrainerLanguages]

My very first language was Visual Basic 5.0 and then 6.0. Only later I learned about BASIC, but I really like how you could do cool stuff with VB. Not the greatest when it comes to functions which have no "return" (correct me if I'm wrong) and functions operate pretty much an ordinary Sub. Nevertheless, I like its structure, not to mention it's friendly editor which makes it easy to know where your subs, functions etc. end (even though End Sub, End Function etc. help a bunch). It was chiefly depending on modules for public declarations cross forms. I think it was primarily too simple and too proprietary to get further traction, even with the .NET upgrades.

[@gb7767]

A function that didn't return anything was not a function, it was a sub-routine ... that was the reason, arguably this wasn't a great reason but it was likely done to satisfy optimization of the VB interpreter as returning a value requires more under the hood than a sub. The biggest downfall of VB was having to set a variable with the same name of the function to return a value, then there was the hideous declaration syntax and the lack of inline initialization and no character escaping. That said, it was everything you needed to write quite complicated programs, especially when used with COM or hooking into the Win32 API. Strangely I find myself reminded of VB6 when using Python these days, they're equal parts ugly and inconsistent yet immensely practical.

[@omarsilva924]

I really enjoyed your presentation. Very well thought out and deep with research. Thank you for enlightening us.

[@bra5081]

I think there are lots of approximations.

[@AtomSymbol]

This presentation is bending history more than is the norm.

[@lhpl]

Bending? The liberties taken with history seem to go beyond bending, and may be better described as fucking. For a video about functional programming, it's awfully dysfunctional. And fp in assembly? Which machine instruction does not change cpu or memory state? Halt? Good luck writing fp in assembly then...

[@MorningNapalm]

@@lhpl I suspect that most FP language are written in C or C++, at least until they become powerful enough to be written in themselves, but at that point there is a good chance that they are no longer pure.

[@dmwalker24]

That graph clearly shows where the popularity of Python came from. It was at least partially due to Perl (and some other languages) programmers switching over, and adopting Python. It's a fairly simple transition. Perl still does what it was designed to do extremely well, but Python adds a set of very useful and convenient features. Especially for the kinds of people who were using Perl for things like bioinformatics.

[@voltydequa845]

And Ruby was better, regardless of Rails. But Python won. The reasons of Python's conquest deserve a whole lecture on its own. Much to learn about endorsement, by whom and why, etc etc.

[@Estrav.Krastvich]

Finally I got this subtle barely noticeable but still fundamental difference between modularity in general and the inheritance as a subset of modularity concept. Thank you for such an exciting story, u'r doing it so well ;).

[@phpn99]

The problem with functional programming is that it's a paradigm that requires the ability to formulate intensional rules. Most people are not very good at this sort of analytical modelling, and they prefer a more explicit, procedural approach. Procedural (imperative) while being potentially verbose, is easier to decipher. If you go back to set theory, most students would find it easier to describe sets by a non-compact system of attributes, as opposed to the optimal, overarching construction rule. Functional programming buffs get all excited by how elegantly they can model their problem with lambda calculus, and we're all in admiration... but it requires a specially-wired brain and in the end it's not necessarily more practical. The proof is in the pudding: It costs nothing today to have a go at functional programming, but it's not very popular. And it's not because the job market requires Javascript of C# - the job market requires the most efficient tool for the money it spends. You may be super efficient in Haskell, but that is just you. And because the majority of engineers are more comfortable with an imperative paradigm, doesn't make them lesser engineers.

[@Nellak2011]

The whole point of functional is that it easier to understand and read because it is declaritive and modularized. A pure function will always be easier to understand and test than a Mutable Object. Objects require set up and tear down to test, and since they are mutable they are harder to predict. Not only that but changing the order of operations on Object Method calls can lead to unexpected results because associativity is not respected. Overall it is stupid to say that Objects make things easier to read. They add boilerplate, interdependencies, and make your code base tightly coupled and nightmare to read through. Not only that, but once you are done with your complex UML Diagram, the only way for a person to mentally grasp the conplex class hierarchies, if your user requirements change, then you are fucked because OO Systems are fragile and are not Robust. Not to mention all the Damn design patterns you must learn to compensate for the shitty OOP features. Sure they solve the problem, but they are over engineered and you have to study for years to do it right. Prime example, Strategy pattern. That shit is Literally a Higher Order Function. Which one is easier? FP. FP is superior. The only issue is Pure FP. Programs need side effects. So The best Style uses heavy FP then some procedural logic for side effects. OOP is trash as fuck.

[@mfkman]

Functional programming is getting very popular within C++. A large number of talks on CPP conferences are about functional programming.

[@kwanarchive]

Agree, and I would say more important than functional programming is functional thinking. Code can be structured in a functional way and give the same benefits as programming is functional languages.

[@amigalemming]

@@kwanarchive And many people still do effectively imperative programming in functional languages, which is awkward.

[@HermanWillems]

C++ is actually evolving SUPER FAST right now. Soon we have Modules, Concepts, Meta-classes. and much fucking more. It just sucks everything up that is good, without losing back compatibility. For me it's the best language that currently exists. Hope C++ also sucks up things from Rust. :) Because rust has some great ideas.

[@EricPrudhommeaux]

• "Avoid mutation and side effects": anyone writing C++ with consts and no globals is doing this by default. I find compiler support for this in C* ++ to be just as good as in Scala. • "1st class functions": C++ requires some typing ceremony around lambdas; Boost makes this slightly less eye-gougey. • "support for the style": modern C++ culture is all about being functional, enough so that I'd argue that it compensates for the ceremony cost.

[@joestevenson5568]

@@EricPrudhommeaux I mean the ceremony just involves a shitload of brackets. Pretty normal for functional languages....

[@sb_dunk]

Aren't functional languages by nature very memory-inefficient? Suppose you have a data structure (say, a table) that you want to edit, you can't edit an individual cell as you'd be causing a side effect. You'd have to copy the whole table with an updated value, right? Anyone who knows more about this, please correct me if I'm wrong. But if this is correct, limitations like this seem significant.

[@atijohn8135]

well yes, but in optimized implementations you won't get your data structures copied every single time, if you first filter and then map an array, the language will likely combine the two, it's also likely it won't actually perform them until they're needed (lazy evaluation), similarly if you want to get a tree with a new element (i.e. insert an element to a tree), the language won't copy the tree if there's only one logical instance of that tree at the point where it needs to be evaluated. the worst part about pure FP is not having access to super-fast hash tables and arrays, instead being forced to use slower trees and linked lists.

[@mattmurphy7030]

Look into clojure’s data structures to understand how memory efficient structures are implemented in FP. That said, they’re still pretty cache inefficient. Lots of pointers.

[@pineberryfox]

There is a very nice book, by Okasaki, on Purely Functional Data Structures. There are absolutely some things that aren't conducive to an immutable implementation (like Union-Find) but many things translate fine. For the things that don't, you still don't usually end up spewing copies everywhere, because the compiler will notice that you aren't holding extra references and will produce in-place writes. Unless you are holding a reference to the old version, in which case you WANT the new to be a copy!

[@Selisu1]

This reminds me of when I was still a relative beginner in c++ and I encountered functional programming in c++. I had exactly the question used as the title. I saw how OO could be useful, but it didn't seem to solve the right problem. No one else thought that in the late 90s, so I wasn't allowed to use FP that much.

[@oracleoftroy]

To be honest, this question seems a bit silly to me, like the old RISC vs CISC debates. Guess what, CISC won, and even the "RISC" architectures provide CISC instructions. But you know what, RISC won, as those instructions are broken down to microcode that is much more RISC like. Turns out, both won. The same is true with functional programming vs OO, both won. All the popular languages have OO and functional features, it's just pragmatic to give programmers lots of tools in the toolbox so that they can solve a variety of problems. And this has been the trend since even the '90s when the first C++ standard added the STL, a set of algorithms heavily inspired by functional programming style, but done in a way that works well with the C++ language. The first book I read that really taught me functional programming was Modern C++ Design. When I tried out Haskell I realized that I already understood the core principles based on my C++ experience, and now it was a matter of thinking purely in terms of functional programming. Nowadays the discussion isn't if a language should be one or the other, but to what degree. Should variables be immutable by default? Do we opt into purity or opt out? etc.

[@carlosgarza31]

Take intels golden handcuff x86 cpu out of the equation and RISC won. Or better yet considering that most CPUs in this day and age are ARM processessors then RISC won.

[@oracleoftroy]

@@carlosgarza31 Except ARM isn't strictly RISC these days, just like Intel isn't strictly CISC. That is way too idealistic and in the end pragmatism won out. The old concerns became obsolete once the instruction sets started being implemented in terms of an underlying microarchitecture. MIPS based CPUs are probably the purest RISC processors out there today.

[@karolrvn]

Interesting metaphor/analogy. Btw, Apple might be moving to Arm. Motorola 68xxx (CISC) -> PowerPC (RISC) -> Intel (CISC) -> Arm (RISC). Btw initially Apple was using Pascal, for the first Mac :). Btw ObjectiveC was more like SmallTalk, whereas Swift feels more like Java/C#/C++ type OOP.

[@karolrvn]

I think immutable for "variables" (consts) is kinda easy - const is the more frequent use case, and more safe, so should be default. Now mutable/immutable objects/structs is another question. I wouldn't mind a language in which immutable is default, as long as there is a way to opt-out. I think having immutable as default could help many devs realize the benefits, by just making them "stumble" into the defaultness and ponder (hmmm, this must have some benefits, since it is default :) ).

[@joaquinel]

how much assembler did you do. I did it in the 80's to 90's I saw the start of the debate, it was clear for me, RISC was the best. The reason CISC ruled is Intel and it's killer app... (and killer hardware!) Windows over PC. Intel said "I can do one cycle instructions too" but that wasnt the point. You cannot mix the two oposite paradigms. It was easier to see that those days : You have very limited space in a chip: What stuff do you prefer to carry inside. * CISC favors complex and different length instruction set, lots of control circuits. It leaves little space to store data. The worst from Intel, all the operations worked only in the main register, "A" the accumulator. * RISC was: Very few very basic instrucrion set, lots of registers to store data, and any operation worked on any register. You don't waste so many cycles moving data from/to memory. REALLY fast. * Complex instructions were less than 1% of a program, many of them never used at all. * RISC forced you to do complex things outside the chip. Complex took more instructions, bur less data tamper. What about programing? This is important. RISC was posible because of compilers. Programers dont need to implement them on every program, compilers do.

[@ChevronTango]

I do program in C# with an FP style. It's interesting that my colleagues pick up on some of the patterns I use as, "oh that's a really good way of making systems safe and easy to test" but don't immediately identify the patterns they are starting to use as FP.

[@jkf16m96]

I would love to see well used funcional programming. The codebase right now is full of functions that changes states to other states and to edit it, you have to jump from line to line. Its a whole spagetti

[@nycksw]

Excellent presentation. Compelling rationale. Thanks, Richard!

[@noxagonal]

I think the best approach is to have a little bit of both FP and OOP, though with concepts now in c++ I think FP will become a little bit more common. Personally I consider free functions as general and should do general tasks while member functions are specific to the object. Take for example a function "reserve" if it's a member of a container it's pretty clear of what it does, if it's a free function then it's purpose may change based on the parameter type, which muddied it's meaning to me, or you make it's name super long or abbreviated to hell. I think the fact that the IDE helps you browse what the object can do, eg. What member functions it has, helps with the object's usage.

[@SanthoshMaruthi]

Excellent talk, one small addition Microsoft did build a fantastic IDE for Java and called VJ++ , but it was their own take on Java and soon fell out of favor but lives on in some odd nooks and crannies as Visual J# .

[@Jaroen66]

Wow that's a rather strange argument "if this other form of Java would have been marketed it would have been the major paradigm".. Don't you think a lot of thought would have gone into deciding which language to market in the first place? He is also vastly discrediting potential reasons like 'ease of use' and 'productivity', both of which are pretty hard to measure from language to language, but they just 'evolved' to be dominant perhaps for this reason

[@davidwuhrer6704]

_> Don't you think a lot of thought would have gone into deciding which language to market in the first place?_ Why would you think that? Microsoft had BASIC. Sun had Java. Java was orignally called Oak and was meant to be a better C++. Sun wanted something that runs on a VM, something hardware agnostic, which C and C++ are decidedly not. And something with a more marketable name. Apple had a very marketable name. What kind of name is "Oak"? So they took the language they had, changed the name, put it on a VM, and aggressively marketed it, not always strictly honestly. The language can be trademarked, but any Turing-complete language is just one of infinitey many ways to express the same things. The algorithm doesn't care what language it is written in: It is still the same algorithm. The CPU doesn't care what language the code was compiled from: It is processing the same instructions.

[@natetolbert3671]

True to a point. However, most of the frameworks that we've adopted in the last decade or so have just complicated things imo. I feel like we're at a point where we're changing for the sake of change... Has anyone else felt this, or is it just me?

[@Double-Negative]

Whenever I start writing a Lua script, I add functions which return tables of data and functions, sometimes even overriding operators so in the end, it feels like it's both functional and object oriented. I messed with it enough that (output..the..squareroot..of)("50") both compiled and ran flawlessly so yeah, Lua is really underrated.

[@Name-ot3xw]

I'm learning to program, and I do like objects, but I feel that the way we're being taught has us lean on objects much more than makes sense. I realize that this is to build 'reps', but I feel that it is also directly teaching us bad habits.

[@michaelbergman1708]

Engineering has always been about resolving what can be done vs. what can be done economically. This is true even in software engineering and it isn't complicated. Much of what we do today in software engineering is a direct result of the free software and open source movement and it is the main reason why programming has exploded over the last twenty years. But first let me talk about Visicalc because I think the analysis of why it became popular is completely wrong. First of all, I have no idea where he is getting the $10000 price tag for the hardware. An Apple II computer with monitor was just under $1300, and with two floppy drives at $350 each brings it up to under $2000. So if you, as a business, get 5 of these then, yes, $10000 is achievable. But as a business, where you have a serious need for this kind of work, you either shell out $2000 per machine, or you get a minicomputer system or timeshare on a mainframe. IBM's minicomputers, at that time could cost anywhere between $10,000 to $100,000, not including the maintenance contracts. So if you look at getting 5 microcomputers, which you own, at $10,000 vs a low end minicomputer for $10,000 + additional costs, as a business, it is a no-brainer. Additionally, the staff that you would need for the running the software and maintaining the equipment was far less for microcomputers than for minicomputers. It really comes down to the economics, not the "killer-app" theory. So, now let's look at the programming languages themselves. In fact, let us look at the top three languages: Javascript, Python and Java. They have two things in common: they have been around for better twenty years (remarkably, Python was created in 1989) and they are free. While Richard Feldman explains that Javascript is dominant because it holds sway over the internet and internet applications, that is strictly not true. With the advent of platforms like node.js plus many application that embed Javascript as their scripting extension, thanks in large part to Javascript interpreters starting with SpiderMonkey from the Mozilla Project. Java started out as a horribly buggy slow and buggy virtual machine and programming language to a fast and stable environment for serious enterprise programming. People who have embraced Python, have developed hundreds of libraries and has been the go-to environment for big data/machine learning/predictive analysis applications which can be written quickly and easily. Much of what it can do can also be done with the R language/environment and Octave, but without the overhead. C#, while technically free (if you buy the Microsoft development tools or use its open source version Mono) (actually, because Microsoft has made it free with its Community version of Visual Studio, so it is actually free) with their development tools has also matured since it was created 20 years ago and when I did use it for some of my projects, I found it very easy to use and was able to get projects done quickly. One of those projects was a small web server which I was able to have up and running in a couple of weeks. C/C++ used to cost around $100 - $1000 for a compiler. With projects like GCC and CLang have brought it down to zero. My first C compiler in 1990 cost just under $100 dollars. My first Modula-2 compiler in 1988 cost $150. In 1996, the C/C++ compilers came as part of the package of MSDN development tools so it was hard to say how much it cost by itself. So if you look at any language now, they are free. You pay for the development environment and tools to go along with the language. You also have to have the experience to go along with it, which means you have to find people who have wanted to invest their time in those languages, because companies do not want to pay for it. C/C++, Java, Javascript, C# and Objective C have similar structures and syntax. Python got its wings in academia where they are not as concerned about ROI (return on investment) as commercial businesses. What holds functional programming back is a compelling reason to use it. Richard Feldman has his roots (pardon the pun) in Elm, so I went to the elm.org website. It's title says: "Elm - A delightful language for reliable webapps". I don't use a language because it is "delightful". I use it because it solves a problem. I have used BASIC, FORTRAN, C/C++, Modula-2, Java, Javascript, XML/XLST, Prolog, LISP, Ada, PCL5, Postscript, Ant, Bash, and others, all with the intent of solving problems. I have had no compelling reason to use any functional programming language. Maybe one exists, I just haven't seen any. The second problem I have with it is how the functional programming community acts like they are victims. "Woe is us. Nobody likes us. Why doesn't everyone think like us." That is what this 46 minute video is, an expression of victim-hood when they should instead give examples of why their paradigm is better than others in particular cases. If you can't do that without slamming other tools, no one is going to take you seriously. If I say that you ought to use a hoe exclusively over a shovel for gardening, you would (justifiably) laugh at me. Why are you so concerned that other people don't think like you. It's silly and it makes you look childish. It looks like you are treating your choice of language paradigms as a religion rather than engineering tools. So stop blaming others for your problems. Stop whining and crying about how you are not understood. If you really have something (and I am not convinced that you have), then present your advantages rather than try to undercut everyone else.

[@coocoo3336]

Wall of text

[@lioncaptive]

I read your comments..., how interesting and compelling they are and wish I could get more of it...well done. Most people in this field do not express themselves as you do...my opinion.

[@gimlam5909]

Maybe check this out as a follow-up kzbin.info/www/bejne/aZ-UaKp-mpqqe9k

[@Fasut91]

Tldr. Nah, just kidding. You have a good one: projects budget, ROI, training, knowledge transfer, etc. FP (as I saw personally with Haskell and ML) has a way harder learning curve than others (like C, Java, Javascript) so there is a market problem. I do believe FP is (somehow) going to be on the top 10 someday though

[@john.dough.]

This is a great comment. Thanks for sharing

[@catStone92]

composition over inheritance is an advice you give to people learning OO because when they start getting into OO they have a tendency to start creating subclasses for every field they need to add when in fact they would be better served by having more members in some object rather than a specific subclass for a given structure. The "aha" moment comes when you realize that objects aren't there to encapsulate data/strucure, but behaviour. And this is where we get into the most important feature of OO which is conviniently left out of this talk: polymorphism. And if you want to understand just how powerful this can be go look up the design pattern template method (and in fact a lot of design patterns are really difficult to implement without OO features). and more importantly, as mentioned, functional programming requires no special language features. There's a reason for that. Paradigms are hierarchical. Functional -> Imperative -> OO you can do functional in OO languages, you can't do OO in languages with no OO support (or rather, you can hack something like it but it's not worth it) OO languages have MORE features. That's why they're popular. And applications aren't paradigm pure. Most real world applications don't use just one paradigm, they use all of them as needed. Calling a static function to make some calculations? Functional programming Calling a function to change a state (say, saving something to a database)? Imperative programming Using a subclass to extend the behaviour of your web service interceptor? Object oriented programming

[@Gennys]

I'm not sure a lot of people even consider that the biggest part of why OOP is popular is the fact that human beings don't think "functionally" in their day to day lives. They think "objectively". Object-oriented programming I would argue is more intuitive, conceptually. We've evolved to think about objects and their states. We have entire sections of our brain specifically designed for it. Our visual cortex is one big object recognition processor. I think us programmers get way way too far the weeds instead of trying to take a step back and thinking about human nature, and the way our brains actually work.

[@Gennys]

You have to train yourself to think functionally when object-orientation is kind of built-in from the jump.

[@ZT1ST]

@41:29; I think there is one important detail - inheritance over composition isn't "Best Practice", but it's used enough for abstraction in a way that makes the "Bad Practice" more popular because it *is* significantly different from structs and procedures, and OO languages abilities to make "Bad Practice" work *better* than "Best Practice" are what make them popular. Like if installing wheels on a car backwards caused the car to drive more efficiently and faster, while also being safer - no matter how much a mechanic argues it's "Bad Practice", if that was the case, people would consistently and routinely install wheels backwards on their cars. If installing wheels correctly led to no significant difference from just not having proper wheels on a car, then you presumably run across the question of "Why are we bothering to have wheels on a car?".

[@ReinPetersen]

javascript isn't really OO - it is better described as prototypal in that it does away with classes and methods (although you can emulate them and recently they have added syntactical sugar for them) - functions are first-class citizens in javascript so you can *almost* argue that javascript is also a functional language although it falls short for purists. You might call it a PROTOTYPAL-FUNCTIONAL language as it straddles both and, in doing so, is very unique and effective way to program. Add to that it's C-style syntax and you have a legible and easily understood syntax in a unique language that allows you the best of both worlds where sometimes functional-style and composition are favored to solve problems, or when encapsulation (which it does quite well with closures) and strict hierarchies ( that are unlikely to change) are needed. It wasn't just that javascript had dominance in web-clients that propelled it - it was the freedom it gave us.

[@karlschipul9753]

Your statement is only true up until ES5 JS. ES6 and beyond have true OOP classes.

[@Adolf1Extra]

@@karlschipul9753 JS has always had "true OOP" classes, it's just that the inheritance model is prototypal. class is merely syntax sugar, with only a couple differences.

[@ArturoTorresSanchez]

What even is the point of prototypal inheritance tho? The only thing I've seen it useful for is shims, and that's more because of the lack of a standard library for JS and less because it was a genius idea to implement

[@Bermeslivre]

@@karlschipul9753 No, the classes in js are just syntactic sugar for prototype inheritance.

[@voidvector]

The difference between Prototypical and Classical OOP is moot to normal programmers, it is only important to language implementers and low-level hackers. The only practical difference is in Prototypical you can grab the "prototype" object and manipulate it at runtime and have that change affect all pre-existing objects.

[@zzador]

C supports encapsulation by the "static" keyword. Every procedure marked with a static keyword is only visible within the current compilation unit.

[@patrickdoyle4581]

So then C doesn't support modules larger than a single compilation unit?

[@justusmaier]

Haskell, which I would consider the pure functional programming language, is just now gaining a lot of popularity (and tool improvement) because of Cardano (ADA) - at least I restarted learning Haskell. The functional paradigm might be a lot harder to learn in the beginning (in comparison to OO, you need to think harder), but its benefits have been adopted by all new programming languages!

[@beaismyth6164]

I’m learning Haskell too. It’s been great thus far 😊

[@fernandobrandt7230]

Haskell is a goddam good language, hope that people take a look at it

[@JanilGarciaJr]

It is not harder. You were just introduced to it later than imperative ones. The other way around would be painful too. Even jumping from procedural to OO was hard at time.

[@MikkoRantalainen]

@@JanilGarciaJr If you already knew one fully functional programming language very well (e.g. Haskell) well, which modern imperitative programming language with garbage collection you think would be hard to learn? To me it appears that writing FP style code in imperative programming languages wouldn't be that hard because FP style is mostly about not using mutation and side-effects - you're not required to do that in imperative languages either except some library code you would need to use may require such interface. Sure, jumping from Haskell to C would be hard because with C the language doesn't support anything where you don't manually handle memory allocation and pointers by yourself. For me, the hard part is performance. Both in runtime (CPU and RAM usage) and developer productivity (for example, with pure FP you may not use some widely known algorithm that requires mutation and you have to invent a new alternative algorithm).

[@trejkaz]

@@JanilGarciaJr I guess it depends on one's path, but at least in university, learning functional was only about one year after learning imperative, but what we learned was Miranda, which I still find a hell of a lot simpler to read and write than Haskell.

[@Breakbeat90s]

anyone knows how to find the stroustrup interview he mentioned? the original video got deleted

[@jgordon7719]

Overall I really do like your breakdown of all the languages, I would attribute adoption more to the emphasis placed on platform vs syntactic Style. We will learn languages to adhere to influence and I think you have identified this well. however the reason why we don't all write Assembly Language wouldn't be due to platform adoption either, languages these days are inherently much easier to understand and a lot of that can be attributed to object orientation. even though I agree object orientation alone isn't the foundational reason to adopt a language. I could very easily see that the New Frontier of languages in the future and the wide adoption of them can start with a foundation of functional. But time will tell on that. the fact that most object-oriented languages can become functional does nothing more than add Credence to that ideal

[@jeremiahglover7562]

Javascript was started at Netscape. Mozilla didn't exist yet.

[@MichaelPohoreski]

Jeremiah Glover It was designed and implemented in 10 days. That's why it is such a piece of shit.

[@delavago5379]

Michael Pohoreski from them till now it’s seen improvement. Just like all the modern languages

[@MichaelPohoreski]

​@@delavago5379 Polishing a _turd_ doesn't magically turn it into a _diamond._ JavaSchit is still shit -- it just smells less.

[@bra5081]

@M T Like Flash?

[@ZetaCarinae]

@@MichaelPohoreski Actually designed in about 22.5 years, for current JS.

[@EnricoDias]

Php got popular due to cheap and simple shared hosting options, most of them using apache and cpanel. Back in the day the options were basically asp, php and perl. Php was the simplest, cheapest and nicest of those. The documentation was also extremely good for that time.

[@RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS77]

I think one challenge is it's difficult to reason about performance. For instance, the way you handle collections seems insane because each add is a linear-time operation. Except... it's actually logarithmic because that detail's hidden by the implementation which doesn't really use an immutable structure under the hood, in all likelihood.

[@darkengine5931]

Decent persistent data structures in functional languages like Clojure and Haskell tend to often offer constant-time operations for random-access sequences although with a big constant due to copy-on-write. But a lot of them are optimized that if you try to mutate the data structure two or three or a million times, it doesn't deep copy memory blocks repeatedly.

[@RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS77]

@@darkengine5931 Right, I'm just saying that your intuition as a programmer without much experience with FP would be that code that is creating a new list repeatedly to "add" elements is walking the list for each add even though that's not true.

[@darkengine5931]

@@RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS77 ​I see! I wonder if some of that might have come from copy-on-write attempts with strings in languages like Java and even very early versions of C++. They'd copy the entire freaking string just to add (concatenate) one character to it, e.g., in linear time and tended to perform horribly.

[@darkengine5931]

​@@RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS77 I've been toying with persistent data structures even though I'm a real-time computer graphics engine programmer working over 30 years in this industry with very strict ~16.67ms time budgets for all of us, as a team, to produce a frame. I think a lot of people think someone like me would never entertain data structures like this which are immutable and copy sections of themselves on write operations to avoid modifying the original. But I've been toying with it because I have a former colleague (John Carmack -- you might have heard of him as he's becoming extremely famous) who became an FP fanatic and I found I could write persistent data structures as found in functional languages in C++ which are only around 3-4 times slower than the C++ standard library. 3-4 times slower might still sound bad but but the C++ standard library data structures can't do things like insert and remove in parallel safely without data races. When I test my data structures in parallel against, say, C++ std::vector, mine actually start to outperform it by around 3-4x on a quad-core i7 2600k (hyperthreading helps there in spite of having only 4 cores -- that machine still has 8 physical threads), and by around 10x on an 8-core i7-10700K. So I think the overhead of these data structures is starting to become compensated by our hardware. There is no way to avoid this overhead if we want to write code that can execute in parallel, as parallel code cannot function properly without data races with mutable shared state without making things immutable or unshared or involving locks to literally bottleneck threads.

[@RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS77]

@@darkengine5931 Yeah, that's a similar example I'd think of. Many languages that's a linear operation so it's a well-known beginner error to do it rather than using a string builder or similar. But if you're working in Java or C# or something, copying any list has those same performance characteristics for the most part.

[@_engid]

10:00 minor nitpic, Before making .NET and C#, Microsoft tried to build tools around a version of Java they called J++, but ended up getting sued. That's why they ended up making C#.

[@joaquinel]

Oh... I remember Jscript. How is it evolving? And Xenix (long) before that!! I programed on Wang + MS Xenix

[@drewmandan]

Blessing in disguise, considering C# is now far superior to Java.

[@richardikin]

@@drewmandan Really?

[@TizzyT455]

@@richardikin yes really

[@That_Awesome_Guy1]

@@richardikin C# is infinitly better than Java.

[@striker865]

Man, I love hearing Richard Feldman talk. He is such a captivating speaker

[@GamingBlake2002]

@johnny walker He is such a cocaine speaker?

[@snk-js]

I love to read programmers comments, they are such creative lol

[@kriterer]

I never thought I would have this deep of an understanding of how OO became popular. Cool.

[@Nik6644]

You really don’t after this talk. Try explaining python to a non programmer (or Java, swift, c+ä for that matter) and then try Haskell. The latter is just way less intuitive

[@pxnchx93]

What functional programming language would you recommend? Is F# good?

[@pbierre]

Pure functional programming is awkward for managing ongoing, persistent functionality, such as running an app, or managing an interactive graphics canvas. The Model-View-Controller architecture (the dominant pattern) requires declarative commands to generate the View. That said, in a well-crafted app, much or most of the Controller logic is implemented in pure functional programming. I think it's a bit narrowminded to put the popular languages outside the "functional programming" paradigm, when these languages all support that style of coding wherever useful.

[@martijnp]

I could be misintepreting this comment, if so then sorry. But my understanding is that you're arguing that functional programming can exist in the more modern languages and MVC is similar to functional programming? If so, I'd have to disagree personally. While there might be slight overlap in these methods, but we're talking about two very different places in programming. While you could in theory program in a functional programming style in the more modern languages, in virtually any case I've seen where a functional programmer picks up a language like Java or other OOP languages, it doesn't end well. Yes, I agree that functional programming has it's uses, but I wouldn't necessarily argue that a controller method in MVC would be, in any way, the same as FP, at the end of the day you're splitting up responsibilities and tasks into subtasks which are then divided over clearly defined classes / objects.

[@pbierre]

@@martijnp The controller part of a MVC architecture cannot strictly follow a FP paradigm because it straddles an ongoing process (User's intentions --> the Model). The Model is by definition stateful, and by extension, the User interacts thru the Controller to change the Model's state in a desired direction. FP is only relevant to stateless calculations, which play an important SUPPORT role in giving MVCs their complexity. In computation where no state has to be remembered, FP is the most elegant paradigm. We're seeing more and more "plug and play" cloud-based services that operate as FP nodes....I used one recently to solve a 4th-order polynomial equation. The "web component" that does just the number-crunching is an ediface of FP. However, in order for a human to utilize it, there has to be a browser UI (input devices and graphics-output) that have to be able to remember things from minute-to-minute, i.e., UIs are by definition stateful.

[@alexgrin21]

Not sure about other areas, but in frontend web-development Flux is becoming a more favorable pattern than a good-old MVC, and it is totally based on FP principles: no side effects, no mutations. It is a more scalable approach as it ensures a unidirectional flow of state and separates actions from state selectors (which btw resembles a highly praised CQRS approach). So I don't know why everyone's saying that FP isn't a norm - in frontend apps it kind of is, although of course it's mixed with OO-style in certain aspects where convenient.

[@amurgcodru]

Take a look at how the Phoenix web framework or LiveView (Statefull websocket connection between client and server) handles things with the MVC architecture in pure functional and immutable ways. The "conn" connection gets passed arround and things get added/removed (again, new immutable). Elixir(or Erlang's) way of working with this makes it perfect for millions of web sockets:)

[@dataflowgeometry]

@@amurgcodru Unless we're working with 2 different definitions of "function" (send input x, receive immediate result f(x) where there is no remembered state), adding and removing are not functions, they change a memory state.

[@jalvrus]

"Performance is a secondary concern..." That is arguably true today, but that was very much not the case in the early 80s when I was first learning programming. Performance is one of the main reasons why C was so popular at that point; you could write in a high-level language but get performance that was very close to assembler (referring to PC programming here). Regarding OOP, when it was first coming out, many programmers believed that it would provide a better way to program. This was aided by the emergence of GUIs and the seemingly-natural fit of UI elements to objects in the programming language. OOP also provides a framework for reasoning about program structure. This way of thinking about the program is significantly different between OOP and functional. I believe that difference is one of the main reasons for the slow adoption of FP. It's a significant effort to change the way you think about programming from OOP to FP.

[@cpklapper]

I started programming with APL on a IBM 370 in 1974. In graduate school, in 1983-1987, I programmed automated theorem provers in LISP. Working in the same area in my first job after graduate school, I programmed in Symbolics Common Loops, and then ML, the INRIA variant.

[@synfiguring]

Lisp is so cool. I had a friend at a place I worked at in the 80's that showed me around his Symbolics Lisp machine

[@lepidoptera9337]

@@synfiguring Yes, it's so cool that nobody has ever understood a LISP program not written by himself more than ten minutes ago. ;-)

[@chrispauer3509]

Good talk, a lot of good info and ideas. I would suggest if you redo this to look closer at the history of Java. The Sun push on marketing happened well after Java was already popular. Java certifcation programs were already popular in the late 90's. The timing of the marketijng push suggests that they were reacting to MicroSofts not complying with the Java conformance, and creating C#, and starting to push that instead.

[@fjfaase]

The problem is not so much in the progam languages themselves, but are related to the fact that computers are rather slow and that we have to apply layers and layers of tricks (mostly involved in copying data between different types of memory storage) to make them appear fast. (I am counting about eight different types of memory from a single register in a cpu to all data accessible through the internet.) Another problem, I think, is that the problem of manipulated distributed data sets by concurrently operating users, is usually not explicitly modelled, but approximated with an executable implementation.

[@jimiscott]

Interesting talk, but others have mentioned.... 1. UIs - FP languages by their nature return values and thus are not naturally suited to UI refreshes and updates. This applies to both thick and web GUIs. We can build abstractions over the top....but eventually we need to update UI elements; and therefore side effects. 2. Performance - We programmed in Miranda and Haskell at Uni...performance was woeful. It's only because we've gotten a gazillion cores at high clock speeds, that we have the option to parallelize some (not all) operations . 3. OO - It's just not inheritance & modularity that are 1st class constructs. We have types, interfaces, and understandable polymorphism. 4. Debugging & Rapid Development - VS and other IDEs where we have auto-complete, can step through code and inspect variables is major factor for adoption.

[@aoeu256]

1.) Haskell allows you to create embedded domain specific languages like Lisp, but with Monads this lets them be statically well-typed. Creating UIs games requires you use Functional Reactional Programming eDSLs like Reactive-Banana which is sort of what the language Elm is based on. 2.) FP languages (OCAML & Haskell & Steelbank Common Lisp) are actually really fast, faster than Ruby, Php, Python, Perl, JavaScript which are all popular. 3.) You have modularity and polymorphism in functional languages too 4.) Haskell (and other languages) have a more powerful form of auto-completion called holes/hoogle which let you autocomplete any piece of code. Functional languages all have good REPLs which can be intergrated with the debugger, and you can see the intermediate values of everything if you write your code in a functional way.

[@AnthonyCerruti]

1. Check out FRP streams, for example Scala's fs2. Side effects are unavoidable in any meaningful program (the only program with no side effects is immediately returning) so abstracting around them keeps referential transparency. 2. Check out what GRIN is doing 3. The reason I program in Scala is the power I have being able to use OOP principles _and_ FP constructs like typeclasses 4. This I understand and many people work on solving this problem. Unfortunately the concept of errors in FP is kind of weird (exceptions vs option vs either vs try type)

[@louis-vincentboudreault8283]

​@@aoeu256 To reply from your message you sent me about garbage collectors, persistent data structure, etc... First of all, you completely misunderstood my remark about C++ and I never talked about garbage collectors. Garbage collectors are fantastic and they are needed for many high-level languages. However, the rant I made about the argument "C++ classes didn't made the langage popular" is garbage, SINCE classes were badly implemented. Do you own research about multiple inheritances in C++ and the history of "virtual" keyword before calling me ignorant. Furthermore, persistent data structure have been introduced since the 80s (if not before), linear logic (1989 first language implementing those) and way before that in the database realm (70s) and object-oriented ownership system(80s-90s), Lens are simply getters for Haskell since Haskell poorly managed complex type definition. Monads are only used by purely functional language since THEY NEED IT to do side effects and object-oriented already had that way before Haskell with the "nullable type". Finally, the notion of a monad is an old mathematical construct SO IT IS NOT NEW AT ALL. I don't know why you talk about all the FPGA, garbage collectors, reactive programming (which are essentially events a.k.a old), this is irrelevant to the conversation and the points I made. My take on this is that object-oriented as a purpose in software development and cannot easily be replaced. Functional programming is great but they do have pros/cons like OOP. Go read some research papers and you will see how old is your brand "new" stuff.

[@louis-vincentboudreault8283]

@@aoeu256 Moreover, Haskell doesn't have polymorphism as CLOS or Eiffel have. Haskell has Typeclass which is only used for STATIC OVERLOADING, it is really limited since you cannot redefine typeclass function inside another typeclass that "inherit" it since it is not a "to be" relationship but a "to have" relationship.

[@amigalemming]

@@louis-vincentboudreault8283 You can do all dynamic stuff in a still type-safe and proven-at-compile-time-way using existential types. But if you are used to Haskell's type system, you need existential types only in rare cases, compared to if you are used to think in an object-oriented type system.

[@ClearerThanMud]

I totally agree that being a functional programming language is a matter of degree. But there is one criterion that in my mind pretty well captures the distinction: tail-call optimization. If a language does TCO (meaning that TCO is required of all implementations), then you can confidently write tail-recursive functions to get things done. If not, then you are often forced to write non-recursive solutions, because you usually aren't willing to say that your function only works with with small inputs. Higher-kinded types are another indicator, since they help make some functional abstractions possible.

[@Tynach]

That's not a feature that's exclusive to functional programming. Functional programming makes it easier to work that feature into the syntax and make it explicit, but there are Many languages that perform tail-call optimization at compile time without even telling you it's happening. I'm aware of at least most C and C++ compilers doing this (though without guarantees), though Java (last I checked several years ago) does not so that the call stack is preserved when outputting stack traces. For similar reasons, neither does Python (to my knowledge).

[@ClearerThanMud]

@@Tynach I agree that some *compilers* for imperative languages try to do tail-call optimization. I wish more did! But are you aware of any imperative *languages* (not compilers) that guarantee that tail calls are optimized?

[@Tynach]

​@@ClearerThanMud I'm not familiar enough with the internal implementation details for enough languages to be qualified to answer that question. That's ultimately an implementation detail, and is best asked of people who actually write compilers and runtime environments. I will say that I've at least Heard of cases where a functional programming language (usually a scripting language of some sort) will have a 'tail' command of some sort, but NOT actually implement tail call optimization... For the same reasons that Python and Java don't. So, if those accounts are to be believed (I've heard of them off-hand from people who heard of them from other people, so they might not be true), then not even the presence of explicit syntax for the feature is enough to have support guaranteed.

[@ClearerThanMud]

I still think we might be talking about two different things. Scheme and Haskell implementations, for example, are REQUIRED -- by the language spec -- to do TCO. If your compiler doesn't do TCO, it may LOOK like a Haskell compiler, but it isn't compliant with the spec. Functional languages, especially the ones that strongly discourage mutation, tend to require TCO in implementations because recursion is crucially important, being the way you typically write a loop. If you couldn't do recursion without risking blowing up the stack, then the language would be far less useful.

[@Tynach]

​@@ClearerThanMud Even with tail call optimization, you can Still write your recursive algorithms in a way that blows up the stack. Just have the function call itself somewhere other than at the tail, and it won't be able to optimize it away. I think what you're thinking of is that languages that have an explicit piece of syntax specifically for tail recursion, require tail call optimization to be used when using that syntax. That's reasonable, and to my knowledge no non-functional language has ever cared to include such syntax, but my knowledge is limited in that area and I might be wrong. For all I know Go or D-lang might have something like that.

[@leonardoluistorresvillegas6443]

I really would like to know what software is Richard using for the presentation