[tylerdinner]

Totally agree. As a Javascript dev I got functional code pushed on me in 2016.

It's definitely good practice for devs to learn some of the pitfalls that FP prevents and solves, but implementing it on a massive scale front-end application just seems impractical.

Having worked on a large streaming service and considering the author's 3 MONTH struggle after his 40 YEARS experience, I'd estimate that a re-write of our codebase there would have taken our 20 devs over a decade.

[trgn]

Functional programming, and it's degenerate cousin, cramming random functional constructs (array comprehension methods, willy-nilly currying, ...) in Javascript has been the worst thing to happen to web programming.

What that has done is made a whole generation of developers completely detached of the impact on heap allocation and GC. If web programs are slow and bloated, it's partly because of using nuggets from functional programming just for the sake of it.

[kstenerud]

I'm actually all for the FP things that have been added to imperative languages, which increase their power tremendously and make a lot of tasks a helluva lot easier. But like any tool, it has its place. I'd be equally leery of a pure imperative solution as I would be a pure FP solution.

[eyelidlessness]

> implementing it on a massive scale front-end application just seems impractical.

I was using Clojure/ClojureScript around the same time. I’ve since worked primarily in TypeScript/JavaScript. I’m sure the FP experience influenced my opinion, but it seems impractical to me not to use FP techniques for a large scale frontend application. The applications I inherited and maintain now, which were certainly not originally implemented with FP techniques, have been gradually becoming much more maintainable as I’m able to eliminate or at least ruthlessly isolate mutations. Not only because the code itself is easier to reason about, but also because it’s easier to reason about dependencies between different parts of the systems—even parts which haven’t changed.

[karmakaze]

> implementing it on a massive scale front-end application just seems impractical.

That's true if a team was trying to do so from scratch in js or ts. However React borrows a lot from FP and works at scale. A better example would be Elm.

[hajile]

Anything beats the hundreds of incompatible classical inheritance models rammed on top of proptypes.

Today, functional has won so completely that devs don’t even notice. Using classes is almost entirely antipattern. Factories with object literals and Claire’s reign supreme. Everyone prefers map, filter, reduce, etc over manual looping. Const and copying as a default immutability is preferred to mutation. Nobody thinks twice about higher order functions everywhere.

[tasuki]

> As a Javascript dev I got functional code pushed on me in 2016.

What do you mean?