What are potential disadvantages of functional programming?

Re:What are potential disadvantages of functional programming? by contingencies on Friday July 28, 2017 @12:32AM (#14871985)

Immutability: The property of functional programmers that prevents them from shutting up about pure functional programming. - @raganwald

Computation is not just about functions. If computation were about functions then quicksort and bubble-sort were the same because they're computing the same function. As I said a computing device is something that goes through a sequence of states and what an assignment statement is doing is it is telling you here is a new state, and also there's the notion of it's non-determinism, so the new state is not a function of the old state. So functional programming in a sense - functions - don't solve the problem of programming. - Leslie Lamport

Perhaps functional programming is best for S-Programs and P-Programs...

S-Programs are programs whose function is formally defined by and derivable from a specification. P-Programs [are problems] that can be precisely formulated but whose solution must inevitably reflect an approximation of the real world. E-Programs are inherently even more change prone. They are programs that mechanize a human or societal activity. - Meir M. Lehman, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 68, No. 9, September 1980.

... from my fortune clone @ http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

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Re:What are potential disadvantages of functional programming? by charlysl on Friday July 28, 2017 @05:54AM (#14873129)

In the same spirit:

The nice thing about declarative programming is that you can write a specification and run it as a program. The nasty thing about declarative programming is that some clear specifications make incredibly bad programs. The hope of declarative programming is that you can move a specification to a reasonable program without leaving the language. - The Craft of Prolog, Richard O'Keefe (1990) (copied from CTM)

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Re:What are potential disadvantages of functional programming? by tome on Friday July 28, 2017 @06:29AM (#14873228)

I'm gobsmacked that someone as smart as Lamport could make so lazy a criticism. Maybe he's criticising functional programming as it was decades ago when he last looked at it. Modern functional programming is by no means (merely) about "functions". It's basically about composability and reuse.

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