News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:A Bit of Heresy: Functional Languages are Overrated by kyleburton on Tuesday June 29, 2010 @10:20AM (#1471470)
I don't think FP is all about concurrency - it's about more than that. In my experience it reduces the possible bugs in code (type inference / checking, referential transparency) - these aspects make concurrency easier to achieve, but that's not all there is to FP.
Re:A Bit of Heresy: Functional Languages are Overrated by nirav on Tuesday June 29, 2010 @10:42AM (#1471545)
Unfortunately though, FP is being sold as panacea of concurrency problems, at least in Java world.

I think that FP is much more than that, it actually helps me solve problems in a very different and elegant way. I don't know how you classify this benefit but for me it was analogous to solving a problem with recursion or loop; while both can solve problems, recursion seems to be much more intuitive and elegant way - Same for FP vs Imperative approaches.

Re:A Bit of Heresy: Functional Languages are Overrated by vamsee on Tuesday June 29, 2010 @12:53PM (#1471987)
I'd agree to that, and solving problems in FP always made me think harder to get an elegant solution. Though, it also means that you're uncomfortably close to math. I think to fully exploit/understand FP, the programmer also needs to be good at understanding the mathematical models/formulas behind FP. Otherwise, I think he cannot truly exploit the potential of the tools he's using. I haven't spent a lot of time doing FP to justify that opinion fully, but whatever FP I did made me wish I took my math classes more seriously.
Re:A Bit of Heresy: Functional Languages are Overrated by shasta on Tuesday June 29, 2010 @11:16AM (#1471650)
I think it's more that shared mutable everything can't possibly scale in parallel, rather than that FP is a panacea.