[Haskell-cafe] How do people still not understand what FP is about? What are we doing wrong?

Ben Kolera ben.kolera at gmail.com
Mon Jun 18 21:59:57 CEST 2012


Saw this float by in twitter, and it made me a bit sad. Obviously this is still a large misunderstanding of FP in the larger programming community and it make me wonder what we FP enthusiasts are doing wrong to not get the message out to people.

"Programming languages that require random senseless voodoo to get an effect are awesome. Let's make programming hard through poor design." [1]

The sad thing about this is that the inverse of this has more truth to it; that "languages that allow people to intersperse side effects anywhere in their computation without thought are flawed by design and allow programmers to do stupid things that hinder the composability, thread safety and ability to reason of/about their code". 

Has anyone had any experience / success with convincing people that the "senseless voodoo" is actually a boon rather than a bane? 

Is it even worth trying to convince people so set in their ways?

( Sorry if this is even too off-topic for the cafe. Just needed a place to vent my frustration at this. ) 

Cheers,
Ben

[1] https://twitter.com/cwestin63/status/214793627170390018





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