On Wednesday, 21 October 2015 at 14:06:43 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
1. Functional containers.
I fully expect that these have their place, but I honestly have
no idea what they would be. When I've used functional
languages, I've only ever found these attributes to be a royal
pain to deal with, not a benefit. From what I've seen,
containers are the sort of thing that almost always always need
to be mutable to be of any real benefit. Upon occasion,
constructing a container up front and then never tweaking it
after that is useful, but that's pretty rare from what I've
seen.
The only cases that I can think of where this could be really
beneficial would be something like strings, and we're using
arrays for those currently (though they are arguably functional
containers given that they have immutable elements).
I've found immutable containers useful when working with
configuration files. There are only a few places in a program
where you want to actively change values in a configuration files
(configure the values). For these instances it's useful for the
GUI or whatever to grab a mutable container to work with. For all
other areas, immutable containers are very helpful in ensuring
nobody accidentally modifies something they shouldn't be outside
of the provided sandboxes.
