Comment by kls | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kls | Hacker News Reader

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Out of curiosity what platform and tech where you using? I am making the assumption of a predominately OO one based on the virtues of ORM. I have always found that when I try to solution back end or middleware based platforms with OO dominate languages (read Java, C#, et. al.) that there quickly becomes an impedance mismatch and any communication with the database becomes a monster of mapping OO philosophy to relational theory, whether that be via home rolled or an ORM.

That being said, I personally have found that I do not like OO languages for back end dev and I find that functional languages such as any variety of LISP marry extremely well to the transnational and process oriented nature of back-end systems as well as lend themselves to not having to jump thru hoops to contort the data into relational sets (Clojure's destructuring is an absolute life saver here). I find that there is little to no duplication of code in regards to transferring data to the db. You may want to give Clojure or F# (depending on your stack) a try for your back end and see if it does not alleviate a host of issues with trying to develop a process and transaction oriented system, which most back ends fit that definition.

I find the converse to be true for the front end. I find most attempts to deal with the UI in anything other than objects and components (read jQuery, React Hooks), turns to spaghetti rather quickly.

If you are using OO languages to communicate and transfer data to the DB you may very well be trying to solution for the impedance mismatch that is easily solved by using a functional language.

I can recommend hugsql to anyone who wants to work with SQL in Clojure. You basically write pure SQL with some minor templating helpers and then you get the data in a map with Clojure data types. Very nice and minimal overhead: https://www.hugsql.org/

> I find the converse to be true for the front end. I find most attempts to deal with the UI in anything other than objects and components (read jQuery, React Hooks), turns to spaghetti rather quickly.

What alternatives have you tried?

ClojureScript, Reflex, Grapefruit, Seesaw and a host of others, It's my opinion (so take it with a grain of salt) and it very well may be the way my brain works but I just find functional to not marry well to UI development. For the service and process oriented stuff associated with the front end I think it is great, but when it comes to modeling components, I find objects and inheritance work far better.

This is one of the reasons I have long been a huge proponent of Javascript despite it warts, as it can be OO when I need it to be OO and functional when I need it to be functional.

I've used ClojureScript with re-frame professionally for over 2 years, and it's been the first time in over 20 years of development that I've enjoyed working on the front-end. Unidirectional data flow with a single app atom has been a dream to work with.

It was a Flask app using SqlAlchemy (so Python). I'm not sure functional programming would have changed the situation much. I imagine there would still be repeated patterns involving reading and writing to the database in slightly different ways, and it would still make sense to use some sort of library. But I haven't used functional languages much, so I can't say for sure either way.

Well, the difference is that in a data oriented language, you do not need to map Objects to relations. You can get the data back in the relational format and use it as is in your app. So you don't need an ORM. You might still have a library to help you build dynamic SQL queries, but no object-relational mapping needed.

> Well, the difference is that in a data oriented language, you do not need to map Objects to relations. You can get the data back in the relational format and use it as is in your app.

You can do that in an OO language, too; relations (whether constant or variable, and whether there data is held locally by the program or remotely, as in an RDBMS) are perfectly valid objects.

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