Lots of words without much value, just like FP!
Seriously, why is this on the homepage? Doesn't contain anything interesting about FP.
Seriously, why is this on the homepage? Doesn't contain anything interesting about FP.
not sure if
a) people didn't get the pun
b) the pun wasn't intended
or c) both
:thinking:
(Instead, they just functionally transform shallow copies of input data, iirc this paradigm is called 'data driven programming')
...so, yeah, "no values" relative to the amount of words used in FP. The pun needs a bit of a stretch, but I'd take it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm so confused by this haha.
A value is a term in a language's grammar that cannot be further reduced by the semantics of that language.
In some OO languages, objects may be values but functions or types may not. (Though this has been changing lately as more OO languages are getting on board with higher-order functions, for example.)
In most FP languages, functions and types are also values. In the lambda calculus, two out of the three possible terms are values. In the pi calculus, types become values (and, therefore, values become types).
This is where I was going with my previous comment: FP languages tend to have a wider variety of "values" than the OO languages, which instead just have lots of extra core forms in the language that don't directly translate to the values of the language's semantics.
It is attracting the same kind of people that 15 years ago would have reached for (and preached) the GoF book.
Well (1) this is not inherent to all functional programming, and (2) the joke appears to imply that code written in FP will be more verbose with less content, which is surely not the case. (And also (3) I'm guessing you meant "statically typed" instead of "strongly typed", since the latter is poorly defined and not generally the subject of discussion among functional programmers that I've interacted with.)
I also have met quite a few people who are into category theory, and none of them have made any claim about holding "the one and only valid functional programming viewpoint". But the people I talk to are genuine academic researchers and not armchair academicians, so perhaps there's a difference there.
As for the category theory zealots I have found at work or at conferences, none of them were academics, but rather what I would describe as clueless narcissists overdosed on FP Kool-aid.
When you say "conferences", do you mean academic conferences or industry/language-specific conferences?
I found that there were plenty of people deep into category theory at ICFP this year (an academic conference), but most of them had very reasonable perspectives on the utility of CT and things to that effect.