The ratio of people talking about how great functional programming is compared to real accomplishments is poor.

I imagine a bizzaro world where Common LISP became a dominant programming language and everybody is resentful about various details CL got wrong and the cool kids are talking about "what a genius Noam Chomsky was", "recursive descent parsers are so cool", "I switched to PHP and became so much more productive", ...

Common Lisp isn't exactly functional. At this point python is as functional as Common lisp but you wouldn't call Python functional

The World Wide Web runs on JS. Which is a scheme with a C-like syntax bolted on. So I really wouldn't say functional programming accomplishments are poor.

React and angular take a reactive functional approach (with side effects called hooks) to UI layout. It’s selectively a great tool to turn a state into a UI

Is this a bot that triggers?

You misunderstood - its the "ratio of people talking" that is poor

True. People should be talking about it a lot more.

Yes, use C++, PHP and JS to obtain Real Accomplishments.

In your scenario FP people would still gripe, CL not being a FPL...

Funny stuff here, this is a long & opinionated rant against null or undefined pointer references in favor of functional. Little to do with functional programming - aside from how it handles this same construct.

> you can’t have a resistor shared by, say, both the keyboard > and the monitor’s circuitry. But programmers do this kind of > sharing all the time in their software. It’s called shared global state

Not it isn't - this is called reuse, in modern OOA&D its either inheritance or polymorphic composition. Some more modern approaches use 'mixins' and age old cross-cuts.

> Another complexity monster lurking in the software quagmire is called > a null reference, meaning that a reference to a place in memory points > to nothing at all

I recall my earliest days, using a microtec ICE to step through my code on an i960 on board and plugged into a DEC Alpha PCI slot, when the instruction pointer went to a place where there wasn't any instructions - I called it 'hyperspace' so yeah computers can actually execute bad code when I write bad code... omg - WRITE BETTER CODE, don't be constrained by the language!

>software industry has eliminated GOTO from modern higher-level languages, >software nevertheless continues to grow in complexity and fragility.

Seriously, did Scalfini quote 1970 BASIC GOTO? what about :<ref> ?

> Instead, there is a construct usually called Maybe (or Option in some languages)

Perhaps, maybe 8 years ago there was java.util.Optional ?

> founded in 1982 with a mission to help government agencies leverage technology

I think this explains some motivation

>Functional programming has a steep learning curve

Maybe for some, not for experienced practitioners, which I'd argue if you need to learn it perhaps you already have some computer science in your background - then not so steep.

I love functional approaches, don't get me wrong here, just don't appreciate rants so slanted and based in bias without real roots.