[rm82]

>Also, I wish people would stop conflating "religious" functional programming with pragmatically expressing algorithms as compositions of functions.

Yes, me too. And that type of functional programming is very popular and very succesfull. Every programmer uses it often, when they touch SQL, jQuery, LINQ, etc.

>I don't think you and I really disagree much on the big picture.

I love functional programming.

But i consider languages like Haskell and their derivates to do a lot of harm to the reputation of functional programming. Lazy evaluation and the whole pretending math == computation. It's borderline harmfull to the development of a programmer to even be exposed to it. The last thing you want a programmer to believe, is that there is some intrinsic order of execution that is magically correct and optimal, and can easily be derived. There isn't. The correct order of execution is not even objective (in a GUI one would trade throughput for lower latency, for example), so the notion we can just skip that whole part, and have the 'compiler take care of it' seems damaging to me. Languages that allow you to specifiy these things manually are considered ugly mutations of some kind of pure math. Sinners. That we need return to one true god, which is "pure" math, mascerading as a term rewriter and bible full of fine print, and a zero tolerance on maintaining global state. Yuck.

[andrewflnr]

I've never heard anyone refer to Haskell's lazy evaluation as The One True Evaluation Order. it's just one interesting way of doing things. I think there's a useful place for Haskell in the space of programming languages, I just don't want it to be the default example of a functional language.