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by moonshxne 1041 days ago
Love expression-oriented pseudo-FP (F#, Scala, Rust), but I think this recent trend of trying to shoehorn Haskell-lite features into mainstream imperative languages is, to put it gently, extremely awkward.

That said, I actually do remember my first exposure to Golang being a blog post about using monads to avoid incessantly typing `if err != nil`. Very much like that original author, my personal values in software engineering just don't align with Go at all, and that should be OK!
2 comments
osclarto 1041 days ago
totally agree, for me golang is a strongly imperative language and that's ok. I'm willing to be proved wrong, but I would imagine if you want to do functional programming it's going to be a lot easier to just use a different language.
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dingnuts 1041 days ago
Big time agreement here as well.

I'm biased because I've built a career on Go at this point but the pragmatism and ability to just get things done in Go without faffing about with unnecessary abstractions is I think one of the strongest practical demonstrations of how incredible an imperative language can be, and for me personally at least, no FP language will ever beat the productivity that I can achieve with Go, especially because at least in my problem domain the real world problems always have enough corner cases that FP wouldn't even be useful.

In Go I just systematically eliminate and handle each possible step and state, in a straightforward way, directly deal with the business logic, and then it's done and it works predictably and efficiently for years. Interfaces really are a sufficient form of polymorphism, too.

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MSFT_Edging 1041 days ago
I've always had a hard time breaking into FP paradigms. The basic tutorials feel a bit like math proofs and it's hard to connect the ideas into things I'm actually doing.

As it turned out, I accidentally started learning some functional-lite paradigms in Python. I learned that I actually do like some of these paradigms, and think through them already, I just couldn't connect my internal understanding with the language of FP.

I started learning Rust recently, as it's an exciting systems language with some hype. There, you see even more functional bits which is just a pleasure to use. I'm not in an area where purely functional would make sense but having the quality of life that certain paradigms brings is nice.

I'm still very much a novice in FP techniques, but the ability to try aspects as I go is helpful in learning.

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