[TheRealPomax]

realist contrarian question: why? If you didn't receive a formal education but you got good at OOP js or php, your expected salary gets pretty close to six figures. No understanding or even theoretical appreciation of other paradigms required. And I say that as someone with a formal education in programming and decent understanding of most programming paradigms.

[lojack]

If you're a developer making six figures and aren't really interested in staying up to date with current trends or becoming a better developer, then it may be a waste of time. This attitude may come back to bite you in the ass in ten years when you're looking for a new job and find that your skills are no longer applicable to the modern workforce.

I will say that it's virtually impossible to be purely an OOP programmer without using ideas that originated with imperative or functional languages. It's also pretty difficult to be a really good OOP developer without writing at least some code that looks very functional. There's a lot of ideas and techniques that help you as a developer no matter what paradigm you choose.

[wangchow]

Because for those who don't understand or explore other paradigms their skillset is limited. There is a lot to be learned in concurrency domain from functional paradigms. Take a look at intel threading-building-blocks which is a modern way to look at concurrency and it is very much using functional concepts. For instance, parallel_for, parallel_reduce, parallel_scan. Reducing side-effects improves potential for parallelism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threading_Building_Blocks

[TheRealPomax]

That has never been a problem in a large part of the programming job market. If your skill set fills the job opening a big coorporation or institution has, and that job sets you up for life (instead of the frantic contract based work for startups or small companies) then exploration is a luxury, but in no way a necessity.

Note that logic applies here: I'm questioning the "you should know" claim, not claiming "you should not know" because that would be ridiculous. Learn all you like if you feel that gives you a leg up, or an enriched quality of professional life, but it is absolutely not a requirement in a well-paying part of the real world's programming landscape, so claiming "one should" is a little rich.

[wangchow]

Well, this is true if all one is interested in is getting a job today.

However, the best developers aren't primarily concerned about getting a job or not, they are genuinely interested in programming as both an art and a science. Money and jobs is secondary (and readily available because such individuals are more skilled than those that limit their pursuits).

[sbov]

Anyone who stereotypes the practices of the best developers is kidding themselves. Some of the best developers I know only know C.

In reality there are roughly two types of tech: staples and new ones. Staples are around for a long time, but HN tends to focus on new ones. The thing is, even our modern staples came from a much larger set of new pieces of tech.

What this means is, that if you're using a piece of tech that has been popular for at least 20 years, you're probably good for at least the next 20. If you keep switching to the new hotness, you will have to keep doing that because you are most likely learning stuff that won't stay around.

[wangchow]

Not stereotyping the best developers but saying that one who keeps an open mind to new ideas will be a better at what they do. Now, obviously there are limits to what people can do but more exposure is generally better.

C is all well and good (anything can be implemented in C) but one must recognize that higher level languages serve one purpose: to help express certain ideas in a more concise and easier-to-understand way than a lower-level language. It can be very helpful to look at why a particular functional language (just for example) achieves a result, and then implement the same concept in C or even assembly if necessary. But by abstracting the problem into a more simpler one, more complex ideas can be express.

Just look at integrals and derivatives in Math. One could compute derivatives using the difference-quotient but that would make more complex ideas almost impossible to understand. We create rules to help us derive common patterns, then use those to build more powerful ideas in a simpler way.

[ArkyBeagle]

You don't (usually) solve a problem directly in 'C' - you build furniture in 'C' that you arrange to then solve the problem.

Using a "higher level" toolset just means (possibly) buying rather than building. Which is "better" is an economic decision, until people's self-identity starts to get in the way.

I just remember a J2EE class, where every day we'd spend thirty minutes updating all the bizarre tools, which would frequently break things. I'm insufficiently venal to put up with that.

[coldtea]

>realist contrarian question: why? If you didn't receive a formal education but you got good at OOP js or php, your expected salary gets pretty close to six figures. No understanding or even theoretical appreciation of other paradigms required.

Because it's about the knowledge, and about doing what you do better, not merely about how much you earn.

"Give him threepence, since he must always make gain out of what he learns" -- Euclid said to his servant when a student asked what he would get out of studying geometry.

[ebbv]

If you are a professional developer you should always be learning and growing your skill set. You don't have to learn about functional programming, but choosing to remain ignorant does not reflect well on you.

There's a difference between learning about it and using it at work. Your job may not have any good opportunities to apply FP, but you should be learning about it in your spare time given how many great use cases it has in today's world.

[TheRealPomax]

the real world does not particularly line up with that statement. For a fast moving contract based world, sure, but there's also the other part of the programming landscape where codebases need to be maintained forever for institutions and large companies whose idea of stable is even stricter than OpenBSD.

I know plenty of people who work on both, and the second category gets paid very good money indeed to be the sole maintainers of complex codebases, with zero need or intention to learn new approaches because it won't let them do their job any better. Does that make them less likely to get a new job? sure, unless their new job still uses the language they use right now, which when you have 20 years of experience tends to not happen - other big companies and institutions will hire you on the spot. But a more important question is: will they even get to a point where they will need to look for a new job before retiring? Chances of that are roughly zero.

[Falkon1313]

Even in those jobs, there are always tangential tasks, one-offs, and side projects that could potentially be done much more easily/efficiently using different tools than the primary codebase. Even when using the same tools, different ways of thinking (patterns, paradigms) can make a huge difference.

The tools used to build GUI CRUD apps may be very well suited to that, but sooner or later all that data collected by the CRUD GUI will need to be processed, analyzed, and/or migrated. Although that might be doable with your CRUD GUI building knowledge, other tools or approaches, more well-suited to data processing, could make that task far easier, better, faster, and more reliable.

A legacy system from pre-networked days may be optimized well within the environment that it was created for, but when the day comes to make it connectable with an API, different skills may be useful. If you refuse to learn them, then either you have to hire someone else or you are likely to end up with a mess.

[pjmlp]

Then the company decides to outsource the IT doing the maintenance of that complex codebase to an Indian off-shoring company and fire 80% of the team, leaving just the ones needed to work as technical leads for the off-shoring team.

Now those guys are stuck with outdated skills that no one wants to hire.

[ebbv]

I'm not sure how your response applies to my comment? I said that your particular job may not provide an opportunity for FP but you should still learn it for the sake of professional development.

Even if you never need a job that uses FP, you should understand it so that you understand why you don't need it in your job.

Even if you never leave your job, having those skills will help you push for a raise and move you ahead in your field.

And chances are even if your job doesn't need it now, unless you're already near retirement, eventually there will be a case where maybe it is applicable.

[TheRealPomax]

And my response is still "why should they"?

Mind you, that's in part because of the ambiguity of the term "should": are you using the "should, as in nice to do but not required" or "should, as in required, and not doing it is wrong", because I'm on board with the first, but that is not how the original comment reads. That reads more like everyone should be familiar with multiple paradigms and not following that rule is bad. Which the real world heavily disputes.

[ebbv]

I think it's pretty clear from my comment that I'm saying should in the same sense as you should not smell like a dumpster on a hot day and you should be nice to work with.

Technically it's not required, but if you don't then you're lazy and probably not a great employee.

[mannykannot]

If this discussion is about the use of the word "should", then it has been a waste of time.

[johncolanduoni]

I feel that case just begs the answer. You're describing a job which is defined as "don't change anything unless absolutely necessary", so it won't directly help your work to learn how to change things. This doesn't seem like a deep result about the uselessness of learning new programming paradigms.

[jjnoakes]

For now maybe. But I think it is short sighted to think that trend is guaranteed to continue.

Down the road, as other developers pick up different paradigms and can potentially implement the same features you are writing, with a fraction of the bugs and in a fraction of the time, why would companies keep paying you six figures?

[TheRealPomax]

why would you believe companies would pay multiple people lower salaries, totalling more than a single six figure salary when benefits and taxes are factored in? It's easy to ignore large corporations and both government and private institutions, but they are not interested in efficient quick fire best solutions, they mostly care about things simply not breaking, and veeeery slowly moving towards what 5 years ago was the future, just incase the actualy 5 years from now prognosis doesn't pan out.

Learn all you like, it's a great idea and makes you a versatile developer ("for some, X is great"), but don't ignore a very real part of the world where versatility is literally a non-issue, and being able to maintain an aging codebase without suggesting changes is what gets you set for life. Claiming that "everyone should X" ignores the real world.

[mannykannot]

The history of employment is littered with the misfortunes of those who expected that one narrow and not particularly deep skill would set them for life, and the trend is accelerating.

Beyond that, there is the issue of whether you would prefer to work on something interesting, all else being equal. Of course, for that to be an issue, one first must be interested in something.