[still_grokking]

Nobody argued for any "better".

The point is: When things become a religion with cargo culting acolytes even the "best" approaches stop making sense.

That's completely independent of the concrete religion at hand.

I did not argue to "pick sides"!

In the end all the approaches are just tools. You need to wield them wisely for optimal results.

[deltasevennine]

This is the problem. You didn't even read my argument. Go read it again, carefully, instead of skimming through it.

My point is:

Maybe one of these religions is right. Maybe something is the best. Maybe a side must be picked.

You didn't argue for better. You argued that everything is the same, that all things are good and nothing is bad and that every single thing in the programming universe is a tool in a toolbox.

I disagree. Violently.

The point is neither the culting acolytes OR people like you can prove it either way.

But calling people who don't share your opinion as "culting acolytes" is manipulative. The words have negative connotations and it's wrong. Extreme opinions in science and logic are often proven to be true, they are often validated. To assume that anyone without a neutral opinion is a cultist is very biased in itself.

Here's a good analogy: I believe the world is round. I'm an extremist. You on the other hand embrace all theories as tools in a toolbox. The world could be round or it could be flat, your the reasonable neutral arbiter taking neither the side of the flat-earther or round-earther.

The illusion now is more clear. All 3 sides are a form of bias, but clearly our science says only one of these sides is true, and this side is NOT the "neutral arbiter" side

[still_grokking]

I did not argue for "everything is the same".

Quite the contrary.

I've said: Everything depends on context.

What makes sense for Haskell does not necessary make sense for other languages.

Also there is no "side" that needs to be picked. What's a good idea in one context could be a terrible idea in some other context.

But people are copying blindly Haskell lately.

The issue is that this happens blindly — again without questioning anything about the underlying premises.

Doing so is called "cargo culting". And that's something done by acolytes. (The words are loaded for a reason, btw.)

I'm coming from a language (Scala) where it took almost 15 years to recognize that Haskell isn't anything that should be imitated. Now that most people there start to get it people elsewhere start to fall for the exact same fallacy. But this time this could become so big that this will end up like the "OOP dark ages" which we're just about to finally leave. People are seemingly starting to replace one religion with the other. This won't make anything better… It's just equally stupid. It makes no difference whether you replace one "hammer" with another but still pretend that everything is a nail.

[deltasevennine]

You did argue for everything is the same. Basically by "same" I mean everything is "equally good" depending on context. The whole hammers are for hammering and screwdrivers are for screwing thing... I explicitly said your argument was that everything was a tool in a toolbox and you exactly replicated what I said.

My point is: something can be truly bad and something can be truly good EVEN when considering all possible contexts.

You can't prove definitively whether this is the case for FP or OOP or any programming style for that matter. You can't know whether someones "side" is a cargo cult or not when there's no theoretical way for measuring this.

The cultish following may even be correct in the same way I cargo cult my belief that the world is ROUND and not flat.

[still_grokking]

> My point is: something can be truly bad and something can be truly good EVEN when considering all possible contexts.

No, that's impossible. "Truly good" or "truly bad" are moral categories. Something closely related to religion, BTW…

> You can't know whether someones "side" is a cargo cult […]

Of course I can.

If it objectively makes no sense (in some context), and is only blindly copied from somewhere else without understanding why there things were done the way they were done, this is called "cargo cult". That's the definition of this term.

How can I tell whether there is no understanding behind something? If the cultists would understand what they are actually copying they wouldn't copy it at all. ;-)

Replacing methods with free standing functions is for example on of such things: In Haskell there are no methods. So free standing functions are all you have. But imitating this style in a language with methods makes no sense at all! It complicates things for no reason. This is obviously something where someone does not understand why Haskell is like it is. They just copy on the syntax level something that they think is "functional programming". But surface syntax should not be missed for the actual concepts! Even it's easy to copy the syntax instead of actually adapting the ideas behind it (only where it makes sense of course!).

[deltasevennine]

>No, that's impossible. "Truly good" or "truly bad" are moral categories. Something closely related to religion, BTW…

Wrong. Good and bad is used in a fuzzy way here, I'm OBVIOUSLY not talking about morality OR religion. What I am talking about are things that can be potentially quantified to a formal theory. For example we know the shortest distance between two points is a line. We have formalized algorithmic speed with computational complexity theory. O(N) is definitively more "good" then O(N^2).

Right now we don't have optimization theory or formal definitions on logic organization. We can't quantify it so we resort to opinionated stuff. And the whole thing goes in circles. But that is not to say this is impossible to formalize. We just haven't yet so all arguments go nowhere. But the shortest distance between two points? Nobody argues about that (I hope some pedantic person doesn't bring up non-euclidean geometry because come on).

All we can say right now is because there is no theory, nothing definitive can be said.

>Of course I can. >If it objectively makes no sense (in some context), and is only blindly copied from somewhere else without understanding why there things were done the way they were done, this is called "cargo cult". That's the definition of this term.

You can't. The definition of bias is that the person who is biased is unaware of it. You can talk with every single religious person in the world. They all think they arrived at their beliefs logically. Almost everyone thinks the way they interpret the world is logical and consistent and it makes sense. They assume everyone else is wrong.

To be truly unbiased is to recognize the possibility of your own fallibility. To assume that your point of view is objective is bias in itself. You ask those people who "blindly" copy things if they did it blindly, they will tell you "No." They think they're conclusions are logical they don't think they're blind. The same way you don't think your blind, the same way I don't think I'm blind. All blind people point at other blind people and say everyone else is blind except for them.

The truly unbiased person recognizes the possibility of their own blindness. But almost nobody thinks this way.

Nobody truly knows who is blind and who is not. So they argue endlessly and present factoids to each other like this one here you just threw at me:

"Replacing methods with free standing functions is for example on of such things: In Haskell there are no methods. So free standing functions are all you have. But imitating this style in a language with methods makes no sense at all! It complicates things for no reason. This is obviously something where someone does not understand why Haskell is like it is. They just copy on the syntax level something that they think is "functional programming". But surface syntax should not be missed for the actual concepts! Even it's easy to copy the syntax instead of actually adapting the ideas behind it (only where it makes sense of course!)."

I mean how do you want me to respond to this factoid? I'll throw out another factoid:

Forcing people to use methods complicates things for no reason. Why not just have state and logic separated? Why force everything into some horrible combination? If I want to use my method in another place I have to bring all the state along with it. I can't move my logic anywhere because it's tied to the contextual state. The style of the program itself is a weakness and that's why people imitate another style.

And boom. What are you gonna do? Obviously throw another factoid at me. We can pelt each other with factoids and the needle doesn't move forward at all.

[still_grokking]

> Forcing people to use methods complicates things for no reason.

No, it doesn't.

All functions are in fact objects and most are methods in JavaScript, and there is nothing else.

Methods (== properties assigned function object values) are the natural way to express things in JavaScript.

Trying to pretend that this is not the case, and trying really hard to emulate (free) functions (which, to stress this point once more, do not exist in JavaScript) makes on the other hand's side everything more complicated than strictly needed.

> Why not just have state and logic separated?

That's a good idea.

This is also completely orthogonal to the question on how JavaScript is supposed to be used.

JavaScript is a hybrid langue. Part Small Talk, part Lisp.

It's common in JavaScript since inception to separate data (in the form of objects that are serializable to and from JSON) from functionality (in the form of function objects).

JavaScript was never used like Java / C++ / C#, where you glue together data and functionality into classes, and still isn't used like that (nevertheless they've got some syntax sugar called "class" at some point).

> Why force everything into some horrible combination?

Nobody does that. At least not in JavaScript.

Still that does permit to use methods.

Functions themself are objects. Using objects is the natural way for everything in JavaScript as there is nothing else than objects. Everything in JavaScript is an object. And any functionality the language provides is through methods.

Working against the basic principles of a language is a terrible idea! (In every language, btw). It complicates everything for no reason and has horrible code abominations as a consequence.

> If I want to use my method in another place I have to bring all the state along with it.

No, you don't. You need only to bring the data that you want to operate on.

The nice thing is: You get the functionality right at the same place as the data. You don't need to carry around anything besides the data that you work on.

The alternative is needing to bring the modules that carry the functionality that you want to apply to the data you need also to have around… As an example: `items.map(encode)` is nicer to write and read than `List.map items encode`.

You don't need to carry around the `List` module when the method can already be found on the prototype of the data object. Also it's more clear what's the subject and what's the object of the operation.

> I can't move my logic anywhere because it's tied to the contextual state.

That's just not true in JavaScript.

Nothing is easier then passing functions objects around, or change the values of properties that reference such function objects.

JavaScript is one of the most flexible languages out there in this regard!

You can even rewrite built-in types while you process them. (Not that I'm advocating for doing so, but it's possible).

> The style of the program itself is a weakness […]

You did not present any facts that would prove that claim.

> […] that's why people imitate another style.

No, that's not the reason.

You don't need to imitate Haskell when you want to write functional programs in a Lisp derived language… ;-)

People are obviously holding some cargo cult ceremonies when trying to write Haskell in JavaScript.

Your other opinions are based on wrong assumptions. I'm not going into that in detail, but some small remarks:

> For example we know the shortest distance between two points is a line.

In Manhattan¹? ;-)

> O(N) is definitively more "good" then O(N^2).

Maybe it's more "good"…

But it's for sure not always faster, or even more efficient, in reality.

Depending on the question and your resources (e.g. hardware) a brute force solution may be favorable against a solution with a much lower complexity on paper.

Welcome to the physical world. Where practice differs from theory.

> But the shortest distance between two points? Nobody argues about that (I hope some pedantic person doesn't bring up non-euclidean geometry because come on).

You don't need to look into non-euclidean geometry.

Actually, even there the shortest distance between two points is a "straight line". Only that the straight line may have some curvature (because of the curved space).

But you didn't even consider that "distance" is actually something² about that one can actually argue…

> You can't. The definition of bias is that the person who is biased is unaware of it.

No, that's not the definition³.

> Nobody truly knows who is blind and who is not.

Nobody truly knows anything.

What's the point?

What was actually the point of your comment, btw?

---

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance ³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias

[hutzlibu]

"You did argue for everything is the same."

I do not see where he did that. He argued simply that context matters. (And yes a "bad" tool can be the right tool, if it is the only tool avaiable.)

"My point is: something can be truly bad and something can be truly good EVEN when considering all possible contexts."

And diving deeper into philosophy here, can you name one example?

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

Not deltasevennine, but giving the CPU fewer things to do sounds good to me (in any context), even if it is currently unpopular. Some cults are popular and some aren't.

[hutzlibu]

"Not deltasevennine, but giving the CPU fewer things to do sounds good to me (in any context)"

Ah, but what if you are freezing and that CPU is your only heat source ...

[deltasevennine]

>I do not see where he did that. He argued simply that context matters. (And yes a "bad" tool can be the right tool, if it is the only tool avaiable.)

Well I see it. If you don't see it, I urge you to reread what he said.

A bad tool can be the right tool but some tools are so bad that it is never the right tool.

>And diving deeper into philosophy here, can you name one example?

Running is better then walking for short distances when optimizing for shorter time. In this case walking is definitively "bad." No argument by anyone.

Please don't take this into a pedantic segway with your counter here.

[hutzlibu]

"Running is better then walking for short distances when optimizing for shorter time"

Yeah, but then the context is optimizing for shorter time. You said context does not matter. But it always does. And depending on the greater context, there would be plenty of examples where running is not adequate, even when optimizing for short time, because maybe you don't want to raise attention, you don't want to be sweaty when you reach the goal, or then your knee would hurt again, etc.

Is this pedantic, well yes, but if you make absolutistic statements then this is what you get.

But again, no one here ever said, it is all the same. It was said that it is always about context, to which I agree.

When you only have a low quality tool avaiable, or your people only trained in that low quality tool(and no time to retrain), than this is still the right tool for the job.

[_gabe_]

> I believe the world is round

This isn't an opinion or a belief, it's a verifiable fact. We know the world is round because: if you travel east you'll eventually arrive at your starting destination; if you stand on a ship's crow's nest you can see further than the crew on the deck because of the curvature of the earth; if you fly a plane and make two 90 degree turns and travel an equal distance, you will end up at your starting point due to the curvature of the earth; if you go to space in a space station, you can visually verify that the earth is round.

Cargo culting acolytes will believe the earth is round with no explanation as to why. Just because you believe the right thing doesn't mean you're not cargo culting. If you can't explain why you believe what you believe, you're simply believing to follow a particular crowd, regardless of the validity of the belief.

[deltasevennine]

Sure.

I simply use this "world" example because everyone here is in the same cult as me: "The world is round cult." When I use it, they get it. If I were speaking to a different cult, I would use a different example.

You will note, both flat earthers and non-flat earthers have very detailed and complex reasoning for why they "believe" what they believe. But of course most members of either group have Not actually went to space to verify the conclusions for themselves.

[_gabe_]

My point was most people do cargo cult and that's bad, no matter what. And the notion that you have to go to space to know the earth is round is flawed, as I tried to illustrate using several examples that didn't necessitate traveling to space to infer that the earth is not flat.

After all, Eratosthenes was able to calculate the circumference of the earth with approximately 0.5% margin of error[0]. Since they didn't have rockets in 250 B.C, it should be clear that there are other empirical methods to test these hypotheses.

To reiterate, cargo culting is always bad. If you don't have a reason for what you believe, then there's a chance your belief is flawed and it would behoove you to research your question and prove to yourself the validity or invalidity of your belief.

[0]: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_geodesy/geo...

[deltasevennine]

Yeah I get it. But What I'm saying is that there are many times when nobody can truly prove which whether they're in the cargo cult or the other people are in the cargo cult.

So programming is one such thing. There are stylistic camps everywhere and nobody knows which one is the cargo cult, INCLUDING the neutral camp where people say everything is a tool depending on the context.

[AnimalMuppet]

Nope. You're the one who isn't listening or understanding. still_grokking's point is that even if one approach is better than the other, a slavish cargo-cult adherence to that approach will still produce bad results.

[still_grokking]

Thanks! Couldn't say this better.

I'm not arguing about the approaches as such, I've stated that cargo culting around any of them is a bad thing by itself.

Blindly imitating something for which you didn't fully grasp all pros and cons will at best not help you and in most cases make things worse.

[deltasevennine]

Nope. You aren't listening to me. I am getting exactly what he's saying. What I am saying is that the cargo culters could be right. You don't know. Nobody knows.

Additionally he DID say that the approaches were all tools in a toolbox.

[awgm]

yeah but sometimes its useful to use a flat earth model when for instance the ground youre going to build something like a shed on is relatively flat. in the big picture sense i agree but in different contexts an alternative abstract model can suffice and actually be more efficient if the aim is to build the shed in this case