Re:What are potential disadvantages of functional programming?
by carussell on Friday July 28, 2017 @10:26AM
(#14874450)
It's not that silly, really. The same argument could be made regarding GOTO. The compiler can't really avoid turning everything into jumps, because it's all the machine understands. And yet structured programming is hands down far more advantageous for the human who has to be able to reason about the program at the end of the day.
> any loop can be turned into a recursive function so long as your stack is big enough, even if they're usually hideous
What amuses me to no end is how TCO turns around and converts that recursive function call right back into a loop before executing it.
And this summarizes my thoughts about the main disadvantage of functional programming - you're working against the way the computer fundamentally works, and relying on the compiler to get it right.