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Comment by jemfinch | Hacker News Reader

Chalk me up as someone who disagrees. Personally, I find recursive transformations of immutable structures far easier to reason about than iterative modifications to mutable structures.

At least in some cases, I think that's the expected result: consider the difficulty of reversing a singly linked list in-place and reversing it applicatively.

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Perhaps the difficulty is in designing the appropriate data structures and identifying the correct transformation functions. In other words, designing a good FP program is difficult just like designing a good OO program is difficult.

It definitely depends on the algorithm. It also depends on the language. A lot of the difficulty of learning Haskell, for example, is in the type system. A dynamically typed FP lang like Clojure has a shallower learning curve.

It is true, but it's also unfortunate—I think a lot of Haskell's strengths come from its type system. So what makes Haskell worth learning also makes it hard to learn Haskell :)

Haskell's type system is unfortunate, because for most programmers, 80+% of the benefit comes from how it utterly nails the basics (checking variant type coverage in pattern matching, typeclasses), but the language community is focused on the cutting edge top .003%, because that's where the research papers are.

After working through a few of my own Haskell projects, I eventually found the type system disappointing. A better design would have made it even more sophisticated and harder to learn, IMO. That's the price to pay for being purely functional. Instead, I felt that certain design trade-offs were made, which in effect, make the type system awkward and tend to lead to inflexibility in writing ambitious, comprehensive programs.

Any examples you care to share?

Iit's also unfortunate - I think a lot of Clojure's strengths come from its macro system. So what makes Clojure worth learning also makes it hard to learn Clojure :)

There is stuff to learn in every language :)

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