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by dkarapetyan 4164 days ago
Neither Erlang nor OCaml bring with themselves the burdens of purely functional programming and the sophisticated type systems that you talk about. You also mentioned Scala and that one too is extremely pragmatic and lets you mix and match both OOP and functional concepts instead of sticking to purely one paradigm. Erlang is dynamically typed and OCaml does not mark side-effects with types and force you into the monadic context for all such side-effecting computations.

Purely functional programming still remains a purely academic exercise because it fetishizes type systems to the detriment of all other concerns in software engineering. Although I do enjoy some of the things that come out of that kind of work, e.g. parser combinators.
2 comments
tormeh 4164 days ago
There's nothing unfunctional about OOP. The two are not at odds. It's just frustrating when people confuse OOP with imperative programming and concludes that for sophisticated type systems to exist, all the lessons from OOP has to be thrown out. Imperative programming needs, to some degree, to be thrown out if you want programs that are easy for the compiler to reason about, but OOP doesn't.
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dkarapetyan 4164 days ago
Well there is something unfunctional about OOP, encapsulation of state and some implicit assumptions about mutability. Although I do agree that neither paradigm is at odds with the other. Scala demonstrates that there can be a fruitful interplay between both.

As for the existence of sophisticated type systems I again don't disagree with you. I'm having a lot of fun playing with TypeScript and mixing and matching dynamically and statically typed portions of my code. I'm looking forward to see where that line of work leads because it is an extremely pragmatic approach to type systems and helps me program instead of adding unnecessary cognitive overhead.

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the_af 4164 days ago
> Purely functional programming still remains a purely academic exercise

This is false.

Also, as far as I can see, only you mentioned pure functional programming. Sophisticated type systems do not mandate purity; see Scala for example.

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