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Comment by james-mcelwain | Hacker News Reader

I think this might be a little unfair to JavaScript. No doubt it's a multi-paradigm language, but there's a huuuge FP community in JS, and loads of code bases (esp. in React) are written in a very functional style. Definitely not comparable to passing function pointers around in C.

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Almost everyone I've come across who writes JS in a "functional style" has done it because they've had prior experience using a FP language and are applying those lessons to JS. I believe the OP is talking about those FP languages, such as Haskell and Clojure, which have a very different programming experiences.

While JS supports it in many ways, it's still not a style inherent in a multi-paradigm language like Javascript nor is it (really) the primary style in popular frameworks - despite the fact inspiration from FP languages/libraries has been increasingly common in popular frontend frameworks.

Additionally, even if you go full-bore FP on JS, it's still not the same. Almost no one goes full-bore FP in JS because it really doesn't make sense to nor is it an easy thing to do.

(And I say all of this as a frequent user of https://ramdajs.com)

You can get maybe 80% of the way there, but non-FP dependencies can still hurt you. That's also a problem with clojure dependencies on Java libraries, but less so because at least the clojure ecosystem mostly buys into the FP paradigm.

Definitely don't disagree with anything you say, just don't think the characterization of JS as a strictly imperative language is fair -- especially when compared with C.

Yup. So many good FP => JS langs too.

FP is different things to different people. For me, it's pure functions and a preference for purely functional data scructures (Okasaki style).

Also to me, FP has an emphasis on avoiding mutating state. The second example on the React front page shows how to mutate state, and then they just build from there. I don't use React, but looking at those examples, it all looks very OO to me.

React with class-components is very OOP.

Hooks are closer to functional programming, though (but were released only a couple months ago)

If we are talking languages of certain paradigms imposing discipline then JS not being a language conceived or further developed with FP in mind is not one of those, regardless of how folks use it.

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