mindbat

Can't agree more. I never use rebase; the author's contention that using rebase is a sign that you've f@cked something up is spot on.

Not sure how commuting to a "smart office" is any better than commuting to a regular office. Wouldn't the truly smart thing be to work from home?

I see. You're using function in its mathematical sense, not in terms of programming.

Perhaps the article would be clearer if you stated up front that you're trying to talk about the mathematical underpinnings of the functional programming paradigm, and not how imperative and functional programming languages differ in practice? From a practical programming standpoint, your characterization of functional programming is both incorrect and confusing.

"There is [sic] a lot of verbs in FP, but they don't do anything"

This is both misleading and false. Functions, by their very nature, "do something."

Perhaps you're referring to the immutability of data in a functional language? If so, say so.

"We don't manipulate the syntax tree, but it doesn't mean it isn't there."

A statement so ambiguous as to be meaningless. All compiled languages have a "syntax tree" lurking in the background. It just so happens that Lisp and its variants let you manipulate that tree directly, rather than writing in code that gets converted to that tree at compile time.

Perhaps you're referring to the fact that in Haskell, you often don't control the order in which code is executed, unlike in an imperative language where you have explicit control?

"...just saying that functions belong to the bucket of mathematical objects. As are integers. And sets."

Nope. The quote you use has it right. The names of functions are variables, whose value is looked up like any variable. This lets you pass functions as arguments to other functions, or use functions as the return value for other functions. Functions are most definitely not just like integers in a functional language.

"Your program isn't about what it does, but about what things are"

This is exactly backwards. OOP programming is about what things are. As Steve Yegge put it, functional programming is about verbs, about what your program does to the data passing through it.

Steve's original post, "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns," is much clearer: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...

"Your code isn't just a linear sequence of instructions, but a tree of nested expressions."

This is also off the mark. If you're working in a Lisp, sure, you're directly manipulating abstract syntax trees. But this is a mark of a homoiconic language, not a functional one.

"Functions are ordinary mathematical objects, just like an integer is."

Also wrong. In a functional language, functions are first-class objects, meaning they have an existence independent of classes. But they're something different from integers, which are usually defined as primitives in the language.