Haha, ya, I think if you added pure in front of FP for your post title, all confusion would have been avoided, at least for me.
Especially because I think purity is a hurdle for newcomers, and a hard stepping stone. So I find if people start with impure, and gradually of their own learn the benefits of purity and the mechanism to write more and more pure code, it can be a better stepping stone for them moving to a purely FP language like Haskell. It's a more gradual learning curve, I feel.
So I actually thought that this was what you meant also.
I'd actually be really interested in that follow up post you mention. Because my only experience with purely functional languages is Haskell. And I was under the impression that most of the concepts you say bring too much complexity were actually necessary to upheld purity.
For example, without typeclasses, I thought the type system would be a lot weaker, and you'd lose quit a bit of its expressiveness. That without laziness and non-strict evaluation, you were not able to isolate side effects and extract them out of your functions so they evaluate purely. I also thought you couldn't match the performance of impure algorithms without it. And similarly, without Monads and its syntax sugar over them, IO effects couldn't be tracked and controlled by the type system.
Basically, I've always been under the impression that all of Haskell's complexity was due to it trying to maintain purity at all cost.
So I'm intrigued to learn of alternative ways, that could be arguably simpler, yet would still allow for practical, performant and strictly pure code.
Haha, ya, I think if you added pure in front of FP for your post title, all confusion would have been avoided, at least for me.
Especially because I think purity is a hurdle for newcomers, and a hard stepping stone. So I find if people start with impure, and gradually of their own learn the benefits of purity and the mechanism to write more and more pure code, it can be a better stepping stone for them moving to a purely FP language like Haskell. It's a more gradual learning curve, I feel.
So I actually thought that this was what you meant also.
I'd actually be really interested in that follow up post you mention. Because my only experience with purely functional languages is Haskell. And I was under the impression that most of the concepts you say bring too much complexity were actually necessary to upheld purity.
For example, without typeclasses, I thought the type system would be a lot weaker, and you'd lose quit a bit of its expressiveness. That without laziness and non-strict evaluation, you were not able to isolate side effects and extract them out of your functions so they evaluate purely. I also thought you couldn't match the performance of impure algorithms without it. And similarly, without Monads and its syntax sugar over them, IO effects couldn't be tracked and controlled by the type system.
Basically, I've always been under the impression that all of Haskell's complexity was due to it trying to maintain purity at all cost.
So I'm intrigued to learn of alternative ways, that could be arguably simpler, yet would still allow for practical, performant and strictly pure code.
Regards!
Haha, I guess that is a point in favor of the idea that Haskell is too dominant. :-)