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by unsoundInput
3456 days ago
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Imperative (especially Java-style OO-imperative) programming will just about always win over non-OO declarative programming in an analogy like that (i.e. a Simulation of a real world process) by nature of them being focused on step-by-step "world manipulation" (and object interaction in case of OO). The value for FP comes from proper abstraction over these processes in functional terms, at which point they can be trivially implemented (few bugs, few iteration cycles to get right). This can probably be done for every problem space, question is at which the abstraction costs outweight the gain. Considering that FP becomes more and more mainstream it's probably more viable than thought in the past, still I imagine system-driven games or complex real-world simulations, with lots of side effects, would lose more from FP than they'd gain. |
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Some time ago I thought that, too, but I'm no longer convinced. Directly mutating values (OO style) feels more natural at first, but then you have trouble with side effects and order of execution matters more than it should, you start keeping snapshots of the whole state just to get a consistent world state during computation, otherwise this whole mess produces a whole class of bugs on its own. These problem drive you more and more into FP direction, and the FP style definitely does have its merits in this regard.
I think the following article articulates this very well:
"A Worst Case for Functional Programming?"
http://prog21.dadgum.com/189.html