I don’t know much about Rust so I can’t comment much on that. The intended point of my example was that in a purely functional environment, you can’t have a local, low-level cache, because updating a cache is inherently stateful. So either you need something like a mechanism that lets you break the rules locally, like say unsafePerformIO in Haskell, or you need to infect your entire call chain with whatever mechanism you use to manage effects top-down. While that is perfectly reasonable, given the constraints you choose by adopting a purely functional language, I don’t think it’s particularly helpful.
My conclusion was that I’d rather have a hybrid of imperative and functional styles, contrary to the suggestion in the original presentation and in general agreement with stdbrouw’s comment.
They are purely functional in the sense that NO VARIABLE inside your code can be ever mutable.
However, they do have ETS (which is an in-process cache inside the VM) which is fully mutable and people have long made wrapping libraries around it for transparently working with mutable arrays, double-linked lists, queues, matrices, graphs and what have you.
The philosophy basically is "always work with immutable data except when mutable is more performant or is otherwise more practical". They don't shut the door on you, they just force you to make your intention to work with mutable storage very explicit and clear. That helps a lot when you go hunting inside your code for side effects, too.
As a maturing Elixir dev I can say this philosophy works incredibly well in practice. Code is smaller, much more readable, you don't worry about side effects like ever -- except in very, and I mean VERY RARE occasions (for 1 year of working with it I only had to do that twice) -- and finding a bug is times faster compared to Ruby, Javascript, PHP, Java.
(a) strong visibility of and control over effects,
(b) an emphasis on powerful tools to represent and manipulate data, and
(c) straightforward imperative/stateful aspects when required.
Of course that isn’t to say that no such language exists, but if it does then sadly I have yet to become aware of it. New ideas are always welcome…
For example you can do functional, imperative and OO programming in Common Lisp, and it brings extensive features for working in all these three paradigms.
More recent examples, Racket and Julia.
Now, I am by no means a Lisp expert, so it’s entirely possible that I’m completely unaware of something here. However, I’ve yet to encounter much of an effect system in any flavour of Lisp. Indeed, it’s hard to see how the sort of explicit visibility and control of effects that I’d find useful could be achieved in a language with primarily dynamic typing using any of the approaches I’ve encountered so far.
I tend to agree. The two big wins from a more “functional” style, from my perspective, are the clear emphasis on the data and the way effects are more explicit and controlled.
I want things like higher order functions and algebraic data types and powerful interface/class systems. With those I gain many useful ways to represent and manipulate data that I don’t have in most languages today.
In a world where most mainstream languages are just discovering filter, map and reduce on their built-in list types, a language like Haskell gives me, out of the box, tools like mapAccumWithKey that work with any data structure as long as it provides the specific, clearly defined interfaces required for the algorithm to make sense.
In a world where most mainstream languages are worrying about accidentally derefencing nulls or whether there’s a proper type for enumerating a set of values, functional languages routinely use algebraic data types and pattern matching, and some go much further.
Arguably, these aren’t really functional concepts at all, in that you could have them just as well in an imperative language. However, in practice it is the functional-style languages that are far ahead in these areas, because they are a natural way to work in languages that emphasize composition of functions and careful, explicit handling of data.
I also want to know that I’m not applying effects on resources unintentionally, or sharing resources without proper synchronisation, or trying to apply effects on resources in an invalid order, or failing to acquire or release resources properly, or leaving resources in a mess if something aborts partway through an intended sequence of effects. This aspect goes a lot further than just making data constant-by-default, but it certainly doesn’t require trying to remove state and effects altogether. These things aren’t so much about making my code more expressive but about stopping me from making mistakes.
I want a language that will stop me from accidentally modifying a matrix in-place in one algorithm while some other algorithm has a reference to that matrix that it assumes won’t change. I don’t want a language that will stop me from ever modifying a matrix in-place. Sometimes modifying things in-place is useful.
I want a language that will be explicit about the initialisation and lifetime and clean-up of a locally defined cache or temporary buffer. I don’t want a language that tells me I can’t cache a common, expensively computed result 15 levels deep in my call hierarchy without changing the signature of every function on every possible path to that point in the code, or a language that will let me do whatever I want but only if I use some magic “unsafe” keyword that forfeits most or all useful guarantees about everything else in the universe as well.
In this respect, my personal ideal programming style for most tasks very much would be a hybrid of imperative/stateful and functional/pure styles, with the key point being that the connections between them should be explicit, obvious and deliberate.