| > My theory is that the FP folks would have seen more success had they figured out ways to bring their features to mainstream languages, rather than asking people to adopt wholesale their weird languages (from an average programmer's point of view). I'd argue this has been happening for years and years now. If you want a pithy saying, you could say that over time languages become closer and closer to Haskell. Option types, pattern matching, pure functions (see: Vue/React with computed properties, or any other frameworks doing things close to functional reactive programming), type inference (even Java is getting a var keyword!), more powerful type systems (things like the Typescripts of the world have) are now becoming trendy, but Haskell had them years and years ago. The above is definitely oversimplifying (a short HN comment is no place to get into the fundamentals behind the various kinds of type systems), but I've found all the things I love in Haskell and other FP languages seem to slowly drift on over to other languages, albeit often a little suckier. (I'm still waiting on software transactional memory to become mainstream, though. Of course, in languages that allow mutable state and without some way to specify a function has side effects, you're never gonna get quite as nice as Haskell. Oh well.) |