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by reificator 2750 days ago
> functional fanatics that design solutions only top 20% of devs can understand

Not a part of that group, but I think this is a false narrative. 20% might be accurate, or it might be a bit high even. But it has nothing to do with `top` or `bottom` performers. It's purely to do with exposure to functional styles.

Learning Haskell first doesn't make you a top 20% developer, much as I'm sure HN in particular will want to argue with me on that point.

All I'm trying to say is: there's not an intelligence spectrum of `imperative` to `functional` with `object oriented` in the middle. They're different, and many who learn one first struggle with the others, but that doesn't mean they're lower performers in what they do know than the ones who can talk about currying vs partial application.

1 comments

>many who learn one first

Everyone learns imperative first. "Wake up!" or "Eat your vegetables!" are imperative. No-one says to their kids, "map(vegetables, eat)"

I mean, those are much closer to functional than imperative tbh. At best it's simply too abstracted to discuss either way. Recipes would be a better example.

If you want to use that example it'd be more like this snippet that no one on earth would tell their children:

> Starting from n = 0, take the nth vegetable from your plate, insert your fork into that vegetable, raise your fork to your mouth, bite that vegetable, remove your fork from your mouth, masticate, add one to n, and repeat.