[p0nce]

Hi from "the sea". I think the Functional Programmers crowd overestimates how much better languages can really improve software development.

Projects in the industry would be massively improved by: more focus on quality (eg. decoupling), technical debt awareness, enhanced communication, enhanced architecture, internal engineer mobility, more thoughts given on social dynamics and productive work environments.

It pains me to say this but supposedly "bad" languages like C++/Java (which are actually really well done) are not the bottleneck for software development. It is only a distant factor among many that lead to software being the permanent tragedy it is in our era.

[vog]

Agreed mostly, but I beg to differ with your conclusion that this makes the coice of language insignificant.

The point of modern languages (name them functional or not) is to erade whole classes of bugs. Also, it is about making it simple to define good interfaces between components.

So at least your points "focus on quality" and "enhanced architecture" are directly influenced by the programming language. Of course you should train your people to focus on quality, but you also shouldn't make it too hard to get things right in the first place. Of course you should train your people to develop a sense for good architechtures, but you should also provide a formal language that makes it more natural to express their architectural and design decisions.

That way, your training can focus 100% on the real issues, rather than 5% on the real issues and 95% on how to apply them in your programming language, as you need lots of workarounds, wrapper classes and so on. And you don't only have to write them - others also have to read that bunch of mess, and reduce this to the "real point" in their heads. This may be considered a nice mental exercise, but in the end, it's just boring, prone to errors/misunderstandings, and a finally waste of time.

[59nadir]

> more focus on quality (eg. decoupling

> technical debt awareness

> enhanced architecture

I think all three of these can be improved and alleviated somewhat by better languages.

Some languages most certainly have cultures that promote properly taking care of all of these as central principles.

It's a bit shortsighted to think that since projects are hard for reasons other than language choices (too), we should just ignore languages all together.

At some point that'd just mean you end up realizing you could be even better with better tools, so why not start now even though everyone hates each other and can't talk to one another?