There’s plenty of real world code written in functional languages. Also, this idea that FP is somehow more complex is complete nonsense. Lisp family are some of the easiest languages to learn.
TBH Rust is pretty nice, it borrows (pun intended) a lot of ideas from the functional world (algebraic data types, traits, closures, affine types to an extent, composition over inheritance, and the general vibe of type-driven development), but it’s much easier to write fast, efficient code, integrate with decades of libraries in imperative languages, and the ecosystem somehow feels mature already.
Rust solves a specific problem, and it’s good at letting you write correct programs with low resource usage. It’s definitely a huge improvement on C and C++.
That said, I find a language like Clojure is far more productive because it’s more expressive, and development is done interactively. With Clojure, you start up your program, connect the editor to it, and evaluate code as you go seeing changes live. Once you’ve worked this way, it’s really hard to go back to having to compile your whole program each time you want to see what it’s doing. It’s like having a conversation with the compiler. It makes it very easy to experiment with different ways to solve a problem, and it gives a lot of confidence because you always see exactly what the code is doing. Clojure also interops with JVM and Js runtimes, so those entire ecosystems are available for use.
functional programming ftw
You can’t spell “functional programming” without “fun”.
Functional Programming Theory: 500 pages of lambda calculus and endofunctors
Functional Programming Practice: Quicksort
There’s plenty of real world code written in functional languages. Also, this idea that FP is somehow more complex is complete nonsense. Lisp family are some of the easiest languages to learn.
Functional programming is perfect for all my projects that I don’t start!
Been working in Clojure for over a decade now, and would never never go back to using imperative/OOP at this point.
TBH Rust is pretty nice, it borrows (pun intended) a lot of ideas from the functional world (algebraic data types, traits, closures, affine types to an extent, composition over inheritance, and the general vibe of type-driven development), but it’s much easier to write fast, efficient code, integrate with decades of libraries in imperative languages, and the ecosystem somehow feels mature already.
Rust solves a specific problem, and it’s good at letting you write correct programs with low resource usage. It’s definitely a huge improvement on C and C++.
That said, I find a language like Clojure is far more productive because it’s more expressive, and development is done interactively. With Clojure, you start up your program, connect the editor to it, and evaluate code as you go seeing changes live. Once you’ve worked this way, it’s really hard to go back to having to compile your whole program each time you want to see what it’s doing. It’s like having a conversation with the compiler. It makes it very easy to experiment with different ways to solve a problem, and it gives a lot of confidence because you always see exactly what the code is doing. Clojure also interops with JVM and Js runtimes, so those entire ecosystems are available for use.
Incidentally, there’s a Lisp style language that embraces a lot of Rust principles. https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp
Would you make a game with functional programming? Or anything with a GUI?
Lots of things with a GUI, but games are better left for ECS.
Ok. I just read the wiki and it’s interesting. What’s a good resource for learning deeper about ECS?