Re:Who cares about functional programming?
by TurboHaskal on Monday September 23, 2019 @12:14PM
(#21050289)
You are right on all points.
As for the category theory zealots I have found at work or at conferences, none of them were academics, but rather what I would describe as clueless narcissists overdosed on FP Kool-aid.
Re:Who cares about functional programming?
by DonaldPShimoda on Monday September 23, 2019 @12:18PM
(#21050334)
Ah yeah, that's the unfortunate part of those communities haha. But every community has some of those. :)
When you say "conferences", do you mean academic conferences or industry/language-specific conferences?
I found that there were plenty of people deep into category theory at ICFP this year (an academic conference), but most of them had very reasonable perspectives on the utility of CT and things to that effect.
Well (1) this is not inherent to all functional programming, and (2) the joke appears to imply that code written in FP will be more verbose with less content, which is surely not the case. (And also (3) I'm guessing you meant "statically typed" instead of "strongly typed", since the latter is poorly defined and not generally the subject of discussion among functional programmers that I've interacted with.)
I also have met quite a few people who are into category theory, and none of them have made any claim about holding "the one and only valid functional programming viewpoint". But the people I talk to are genuine academic researchers and not armchair academicians, so perhaps there's a difference there.