"FP has never really left academia anyway" I hear this claim all the time. Erlang is of course the obvious counter-example, it was developed by and for the telecommunications industry. And F# and Clojure are more recently examples of functional languages that were born outside of academia. And languages such as Python and Ruby have been using functional constructs for nearly two decades now, and you cannot tell me you think they are only used in academia.
If anything academia is dominated by object oriented programming. Students are taught that OO is the only way to develop, and so once they graduate that is all they know. They have a tendency to view any other paradigm as primitive and beneath them and refuse to learn it. On Jul 14, 9:29 am, Kevin Wright <[email protected]> wrote: > In our recent, erm, "discussion" one oft-mentioned issue came up: > > Is Java's downfall foreshadowed by the lack of FP constructs, and will > closures be "too little, too late" when they finally arrive? > > and, as so often happens in discussions of this nature, respondents divided > into the pro-FP and pro-OO camps > (plus one who seemed to think that *any* abstraction was good, regardless of > paradigm, and that computers would be programming themselves in the near > future anyhow...) > > A *few* posts later, the typical war-lines were drawn: > > "Future programming *will* be (at least partly) functional in nature, the > needs of concurrency demand it!" > > vs > > "Object-Orientation works, expanding Java like this just > adds unnecessary complexity, and FP has never really left academia anyway" > > It's very common for developers deeply embedded in the world of objects to > deride FP as being "complex", "academic", and "overly abstract", but what > really caught my attention this time was that the pro-FP crowd were giving > very definite concrete examples of the benefits to be obtained, whereas the > pro-OO crowd seemed to be hard waving around nebulous principles - this is > definitely a role reversal when compared to the usual stereotypes. > > Chances are that I'm biased. After all, I'm very active in the scala > community and a strong believer in the principles behind functional > programming, though I'd like to think I can see the benefits (and flaws) in > both paradigms. > > I'd be interested to know the general opinion. Is functional programming > still widely considered to be "abstract nonsense"? > > -- > Kevin Wright > > mail/google talk: [email protected] > wave: [email protected] > skype: kev.lee.wright > twitter: @thecoda -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
