[dahart]

I read everything I could find on the Anti-IF site and didn't understand what the mission is exactly. They qualify and mention they want to remove the bad and dangerous IFs, but I couldn't find examples that differentiate between bad ones and good ones -- are there good ones according to this campaign?

I like using functional as much as anyone, and removing branching often does make the code clearer and remove the potential for mistakes.

But I admit I have a hard time with suggesting people prefer a lambda to an IF, or to not ever use an IF. A lambda is, both complexity wise, and performance wise, much heavier than an IF. And isn't is just as bad to abstract conditionals before any abstractions are actually called for?

[CamperBob2]

I read everything I could find on the Anti-IF site and didn't understand what the mission is exactly.

I have a similar problem, in that every time I try to understand the perspective of functional-programming advocates, I find that the authors always seem to illustrate their points with examples like this:

   match :: String -> Boolean -> Boolean -> String -> Bool
   match pattern ignoreCase globalMatch target = ...

If I'm already literate in Haskell or Clojure or Brainfuck or whatever godawful language that is, then chances are, I'm already familiar with the strengths of the functional approach, and I'm consequently not part of the audience that the author is supposedly trying to reach.

So: are there any good pages or articles that argue for for functional programming where the examples can be followed by a traditional C/C++ programmer, or by someone who otherwise hasn't already drunk the functional Kool-Aid?

[l_dopa]

The problem's not on your end -- a lot of these blogs are just junk, probably the vast majority of ones that fall under "advocacy". As far as I can tell, the author's objection to conditionals is based on a misunderstanding of a different blog post[0]. It's nonsense.

Really understanding where FP is coming from requires an introduction to programming language semantics[1]. Interesting stuff, but not immediately useful to a working C programmer.

[0] https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/boolean-bli...

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/pfpl.html

[GregBuchholz]

    bool match(char *pattern, bool ignoreCase, bool globalMatch, char *target) { ...

[quickben]

Well, at some point you are looking at transistors and 'if's .

How many layers above that you want to hide that fact is entirely dependant on you and the requirements of solving there problem.

I have a problem with people assuming 'their' way is there only way, and generally being oblivious about the vast variety of problems the rest of us encounter.