| > Furthermore, haven’t most languages today pretty much converged around the “imperative++” feature set: If anything, functional programming has absolutely won. Support for first-class and higher order functions, anonymous functions and so in are absolute must-haves for any modern language. These features have become so bread and butter that people will not even think about them as functional programming but these were the main features that functional programming languages pioneered. Now, PURE functional programming like in Haskell is not mainstream. It is a testament to the success of functional programming that these days we mostly think about these extreme examples when we talk about functional programming. If anything, it is object oriented features that are becoming optional. At least the class based approach is starting to decline for good with many new languages explicitly not implementing them. Also, I strongly disagree that all programming languages are starting to converge. It seems you just picked languages that are very similar which I agree, will not expand your mind much. Learning languages like Common Lisp, APL, Forth, Prolog, Haskell and so on though will will greatly expand your understanding of programming. |
No no, I picked languages that have jobs waiting in industry. 3 Billion devices run on a language that literally requires everything to be an object ;) I haven’t seen too many elm/elixir job postings, but rest assured when they start cropping up with the frequency of say JavaScript or C#, I’ll be dusting off my notes from previous side projects. I’ve also done Prolog, I’ve also done Haskell, I’ve also done Scala. Far more important than being able to write Haskellish code for my typescript backend is the ability to write idiomatic Typescript code with good patterns. And the whole discussion here is not whether you should check out FP (you should) but whether learning extra languages is more important than learning patterns in software design (ie canonical Martin Fowler, GoF, Uncle Bob). There are absolutely useful models and perspectives to be found in FP, but I haven’t found them to be stuff that I use every day. If every imperative language is shipping with first-class functions (which I personally don’t think is as dazzling a notion as it sounds—even C has shipped with function pointers since the days of old) and all the jobs are in imperative languages, it seems pretty practical to focus on learning patterns before learning FP. Respectfully.