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Discussion on: Functional Programming Is a Leaky Abstraction

 
omerkling profile image
Owen Merkling

That is the point, that functional programming languages continue to lose in adoption to imperative languages because imperative languages match the underlying system better on a fundamental level. Not even a new concept, just trying to present it in a way I thought was interesting.

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pentacular profile image
pentacular • Edited

Hmm, I am unconvinced that the reason for this is due to a lack of tooling for debugging the underlying infrastructure.

Let's consider Javascript -- the debuggers generally only debug Javascript and don't do any of the extra things you're talking about.

Yet people find it to be a perfectly reasonable language and it is very popular.

It also has an algorithmic evaluation strategy, where i/o occurs outside the program flow (with the exception of things like nodejs and ajax synchronous calls, but these are pretty exceptional).

If your idea was the reason for a lack of popularity in functional languages you'd expect it to apply here as well, but it doesn't.

I think the true causes are probably (a) network effects, and (b) people are taught mechanical evaluation models from a early age [so, really network effects again].