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by Waterluvian 1081 days ago
Be very careful with "why do X hate Y?" Generally speaking, if someone comes out as outright hating Y, their opinion should be taken with a pound of salt.

Functional programming is fundamentally at odds with imperative constructs. It's not that people hate them, it's that they generally just don't fit the paradigm of "build a pipeline of steps (functions) and feed data into it" as well. Most of my software is functional, but you will find the occasional C-style loop, especially if the map/filter/reduce alternative is ridiculously complicated to read.
2 comments
dclowd9901 1081 days ago
I find concat pipelines to become unwieldy very quickly. I’ll generally turn to an imperative loop when my output doesn’t fit neatly into an FP paradigm, or requires a ridiculous amount of translations to accomplish. At the end of the day, I still want to write performant code.
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WoahNoun 1081 days ago
>"build a pipeline and feed data into it."

Arrows in Haskell are actually pretty good at building functional left to right data processing pipelines.

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Waterluvian 1081 days ago
Yeah for sure! The tricky, prickly part of talking about FP is that we get into semantics a lot (eg. I'm sure there's Haskell experts who wouldn't consider JavaScript's `Array.prototype` functions to count as FP). Generally I'm thinking about `foo.map` vs. `for n in foo...`. Maybe "imperative" is a bit of a loaded term for this point.
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epgui 1081 days ago
Arrows [1] are great, not sure why you were getting downvoted on that.

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[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Understanding_arrows

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