Re:A Little Clojure
by bcrosby95 on Tuesday April 07, 2020 @11:20PM
(#22809738)
It took me a long time to get used to functional programming.
For me a big problem was how dense the code can be. I was relying on the verbosity of imperative languages to act as a sort of whitespace.
Another thing is pattern recognition when reading code. I had been using imperative languages for so long that I could mentally gloss over chunks based upon the shape of the code. But functional languages tend to have different shapes from imperative ones so it all looked unfamiliar to me and I got overwhelmed.
Eventually I was able to get passed this stuff and functional languages make a lot more sense to me now. Now I prefer them despite working in Java for my day job.
For me a big problem was how dense the code can be. I was relying on the verbosity of imperative languages to act as a sort of whitespace.
Another thing is pattern recognition when reading code. I had been using imperative languages for so long that I could mentally gloss over chunks based upon the shape of the code. But functional languages tend to have different shapes from imperative ones so it all looked unfamiliar to me and I got overwhelmed.
Eventually I was able to get passed this stuff and functional languages make a lot more sense to me now. Now I prefer them despite working in Java for my day job.