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by agentultra 3028 days ago
> You don’t need to understand what a “comonad” is to use jQuery, and you shouldn’t necessarily need to comprehend functional composition to handle state management.

Is there a point to spreading this piece of sage FUD?

It should not be surprising that pure functions + immutable state results in fewer errors.

The "pattern" Redux asks you to use prevents you from shooting your leg off. If you've written a sizeable application that uses global, mutable state the benefits of Redux shouldn't be surprising.

My only gripe with this eco-system is that it constantly comes up with new names and concepts for things that already exist in the FP world. I agree that the math jargon is off-putting but so is having a dozen words for the same concept. I think the latter is worse.

The library described in the article feels less like an abstraction and more like a shuffling around of syntax. Useful but misleading with a title like, Redesigning Redux.

Update: s/grip/gripe

2 comments

> My only gripe with this eco-system is that it constantly comes up with new names and concepts for things that already exist in the FP world.

I agree, but I think it's easy to see how it happens. It's an impediment to adoption of the project if people don't understand what you're talking about, so simplistic shorthand is used initially to get people up to speed, and then you find that your temporary names have become engraved in stone for the vast majority of your users. People being how they are, you're just as likely to get them to change editors as change terminology at that point.

Coming from no math background I LOVE functional programming and would love to learn what words I'm using have existing math terms.
A functional programming rosetta stone? Sounds challenging and interesting!
Hah. I just meant maybe a blog post that maps the terms I use in JavaScript land with math land. Ie. "it's not a reducer it's a functormonadicfoobar"
https://eloquentjavascript.net/3rd_edition/00_intro.html

Not exactly a blogpost but a nice reading, explains a lot of the functional programming terms and their mathematical analogs.

edit: s/slang/terms

Thanks for the idea. Should make a fun series of posts for my blog assuming there isn't prior art on the subject.