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Comment by goatlover | Hacker News Reader

Like Linus Torvalds. Lispers tend to make similar claims. So does Alan Kay about Smalltalk. Yet most of the world runs on top of C/C++, or COBOL (or Java) for financial transactions and Fortran for heavy duty numerical calculations. Not that FP, Lisp and ST don’t have their advantages. They clearly do. But their supremacy is overstated when it comes to code that runs the world.

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My whole career I've worked with companies that used FP approaches and consistently beat their competition by doing so. If you look at how programming languages have evolved over the last ten or twenty years, the direction is clearly towards FP, because while the benefits take a while to trickle down, everyone recognises them. Less and less people are using C/C++ (and yet it's still responsible for most security bugs); people are indeed still using "Java", but the Java of today is closer to the Haskell of 1996 than it is to the Java of 1996.

That doesn't mean the imperative languages are "better", though, just more popular. I recommend the following video titled "Why isn't Functional Programming the Norm?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4

Sure, I'm skeptical that any paradigm or PL is superior in general, it probably all just depends on various factors.

If you want to say that popular isn't better, you have to say that with a lot of people are either making bad choices or lack agency.

Neither of which makes sense when you look at something like Git or Linux, where someone decided to make a whole new thing without dependencies, and it displaced the previous thing, and the people who use it don't need to care what language it was written in.

I want to say popular isn't _necessarily_ better. Your argument is a counterexample if I had said (which I didn't) that more popular were _always_ worse.

In the world of programming (and I guess elsewhere, too), there are simply many more aspects at play when "choosing" the programming language than purely how good the language itself is. Easiest example is Javascript were it's simply widespread because it was the only language available in the browser. I recommend again that you watch the video :-).

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