Hacker News Reader

Comment by li4ick | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to think that every thread about FP is pretty much identical on HN, especially when Haskell is involved. If you still need a ton of push to try it out, you'll never get it. If decades upon decades of provably superior concepts haven't convinced you, just give up. Just go and get hyped when the next minor FP feature gets integrated into your favourite language, something that's been used in Haskell/Erlang/etc. for 20+ years.

View on HN

Yeah I've focused on building things with Haskell (using way less energy and time in the process due to exactly what this book claims)

There's really no point arguing with people. Sometimes I can't help myself, but I barely ever get anything useful out of trying.

> I'm starting to think that every thread about FP is pretty much identical on HN

Spot on.

Where is Haskell actually used? No I meant apart from Facebook and Uber and Klarna.

> Just go and get hyped when the next minor FP feature gets integrated into your favourite language

We already have immutability in Java - why, the designers themselves made Strings immutable [1]

We said goodbye to nulls in Java [2] but in case you really don't like nulls you can also say goodbye to them by switching from Java to Kotlin, which doesn't have them [3] but also does [4].

If you want to cut down on some boilerplate (without moving to Kotlin), you can try type inference in Java [5]:

> For example, consider the following variable declaration:

    Map<String, List<String>> myMap = new HashMap<String, List<String>>();

> You can substitute the parameterized type of the constructor with an empty set of type parameters (<>):

    Map<String, List<String>> myMap = new HashMap<>();

Go got rid of Generics which made programming so much simpler. I can't wait for its new Generics feature though.

But if you really need that functional stuff - the best thing writing Java code is that it runs on the JVM, so you can code in Scala instead. And if that argument doesn't make you want to code in Java I don't know what will.

[1] https://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-string-is-imm...

[2] https://programmer.help/blogs/finally-i-m-happy-to-say-goodb...

[3] https://medium.com/kayvan-kaseb/say-bye-to-nullpointerexcept...

[4] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50427490/nullable-type-s...

[5] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/generics/genTyp...

I use Haskell because it actually delivers on the promise of software reusability. In his book, John Ousterhout wrote a wonderful phrase: "increments of software development should be abstractions, not features.". I completely agree.

Even though the JVM ecosystem is great, I dislike the languages that run on it, Clojure being an exception. To filter out OOP, it fundamentally abstracts the wrong thing. Modules should abstract functionality, not data. And that's why I don't want anything to do with Java.

> Go got rid of Generics which made programming so much simpler. I can't wait for its new Generics feature though.

What? If getting rid of generics made programming so much simpler why can you not wait for its new Generics feature?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com