By doing this, you separate yourself from the listener, giving a clear delineation between the noob and the l337 wizard.
It also helps to feign surprise, "you dont know about monadic entropy lenses?" or use the word _just_ as in "Just run the parser combinator in reverse, its easy".
For many programmers, the axioms of what a function are (a calling point to code which is contravariant in a product and covaraint in a single return value), what objects are (a unique closure over functions values with a syntactically supported lookup of named values and a system-provided identity function) are so unvarying in their experience as to be synonymous with the word we use to describe it without needing further quantification. That gets tricky when you want to say, "Ah, but this unique way of thinking about this datatype lets us pretend it's a function and then we need to talk about what it needs and what it provides in more general terms."
Since functional programming is actually all about completely tearing down the world to everything but a series of functions, it's unsurprising it needs different words.
Finding a way to entice users to join in the functional party is really difficult because asking a programmer to do it is roughly akin to asking them to learn to program again. And don't get me wrong, I think you emerge from the other side of it better and more productive in every way, but it's difficult to prove that and more difficult still to convince people of it.
A neat example of the later: dependency injection is a massively more complicated concept than just passing functions that provide a value, while providing even greater flexibility and more obvious reuse.
When I showed how to make an object system using closures, they were like, "Cool!"
Some people start with the math, some people finish with the math and others deny the math. But we can all be better programmers with functional programming. If our goal is to educate, our actions should be the opposite of alienation. Some people gravitate to FP because it is seen as hard, as bad-ass and want to show their mastery to others. Those people should probably not be teaching FP.
I'm slowly recording several sessions, and I think about 2 hours in enough to introduce Purescript, explain the basics of Functors, Applicative Functors (which come nearly for free), and even explain, motivate, and use monadic functions. But I don't know how to do this without at least giving folks some words (Functor is a name as good as any, and every other name for Monad is at last as if not more intimidating
It's just at some point if we observe the shape of what we're doing, we can generalize in a useful way further (e.g., the lenses-banannas-parethesis approach).
They've come up with different words for things, and it drives me nuts. Specifically mapreduce: They call filtering mapping, and mapping reducing. I think this is where Redux gets it's "reducers" from. They aren't reducers damnit! It took me weeks to figure out what the hell they were talking about.
We're now seeing the React community go bananas over "Higher-Order Components." It took one look at it and realized I was looking at Reader and thought, why all the verbiage?
Now I write my React applications using GHCJS and I don't have to mess around with reading terrible backtraces and all the detective work of figuring out how a type error manifested itself. But these communities are forced to repeat history instead of learn from them.
The salient point TFA made for me was that language and evangelism are part of the problem. You can't dive into Haskell if you've been a C# programmer for the last 10 years and expect to have the same level of proficiency you've enjoyed all that time. The most effective way to learn Haskell, F#, et al is to literally start over. And that's a hard sell.
The benefit is that these languages weren't invented: they were discovered. By learning them you'll be learning foundational principles from first-order logic, set theory, and category theory that will make you a better programmer. You can take these principles to any programming language and they will continue to work because it's all maths.
From: Florent Crivello @Altimor https://twitter.com/Altimor/status/873648344425299968