[reboog711]

You build software w/o using Mathematics?

You and I live in different worlds. It seems to me that the bulk of what I do writing software is related to math in some manner. I guess I have a lot of "number cruncher" sort of clients.

[k__]

I guess most people build CRUD stuff without (knowingly) using functional principles.

Programming is inherent mathematical, but if you don't progam functional, the math "behind" your software gets more abstract ... or should I say obscure?

In the end your computer is a big function with input, calculation and output. But if you write your code with side effects you can't do a fine function based split-up of your code, you have to consider bigger chunks of code, consisting of many dependent functions as one "mathematical" function.

If the math is more complex and logical reasoning about it gets harder, people start to think about it as "not-math" but something different.

[rthomas6]

I take issue with this because this is only one way to look at programming, not the inherently correct way. Yes, functional programming is a useful abstraction, but at the hardware level your processor uses something closer to a procedural paradigm. So your computer is not just a big function, not literally. Or rather, the "functions" your computer uses don't correspond 1:1 with the functions you write in functional computer language abstractions.

[k__]

Why not?

You got input, output and calculations.

What else do you need?

[rthomas6]

Good question. Why aren't processors optimized for functional programming? I think one reason is because of the way hardware memory works. So to answer what else you need, one other thing you need is physical memory and a way to organize the data in it. Forgive me for what follows if I misunderstand some functional programming aspect, because I'm primarily a digital hardware person, and programming in general is not my forte. Also I apologize if I explain things you already knew.

In hardware, CPU instructions are read sequentially from memory. These instructions are pretty basic... add two numbers, load a data word from a certain memory address, jump to a new address if two numbers are equal, etc. Modern processors do have some pretty fancy instructions but what I said is still basically true. So those instructions are our primitives. The only way to make abstract procedures from those primitives, from the perspective of assembly programming, is to make a sequential series of these primitive instructions starting at a known address, and then branch to that address and read those instructions in order. When you abstract many times out, as is common in functional programming, there starts to be a lot to keep track of. When you evaluate a function that is very abstract, how it looks in hardware is a whole lot of branching and returning to and from different memory addresses. Not necessarily bad, but it's starting to look pretty different in code vs. in hardware. And if you branch to uncached ("unexpected") locations, you add latency when you have to fetch instructions from RAM. You also have to keep track of any data needed at a higher level of the function, which necessitates automated memory management, including garbage collection. These things can introduce a lot of overhead in the program, especially when you have things in it like deep recursion.

tl;dr: There's no such thing as stateless assembly programming.

[cellis]

side effects.