Re:Which Programming Languages Are Functional?
by the_af on Wednesday December 30, 2015 @12:55PM
(#10813260)
Agreed. I find Hughes' paper very interesting, but I disagree with him that "you cannot make something more powerful by removing things".
Even philosophically this position is weak. It's self-evident to me you can make something more powerful/better by removing things. You can make something better by removing risks. You can make an UI saner by removing the possibility of invalid interactions. You can make art better by removing superfluous details.
I still think that types and control of side effects is essential to (good) FP.
Re:Which Programming Languages Are Functional?
by murbard2 on Wednesday December 30, 2015 @01:20PM
(#10813398)
- You can make the Library of Babel better by removing books.[1]
- You can make limbs more useful by removing degrees of freedom, simplifying the control task.[2]
Of course it's about modularity, but how do you get modularity? How do you safely abstract the internals of libraries? Types and lack of side effects!
It's also about correctness. Most of the time spent writing any complex bit of software is generally spent finding out what's wrong with it.