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Comment by haleudo | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree. That functional style actually favors readability and maintainability is a quite strong claim which I read often but it's usually lacking evidence.

In my experience, software engineers "think" imperatively. First do this, then do that. That's what we do in everyday life (open a random cooking book..) and that's also what the CPU does, modulo some out-of-order and pipelining tricks. A declarative style adds some extra cognitive load upfront. With training you may get oblivious to that, but in the end of the day, the machine does one thing after the other, and the software engineer wants to make it do that. So, either you express that more "directly" in an imperative style, or try to come up with a declarative style which may or may not be more elegant, but that this ends up more readable or maintainable is on the functional proponents to prove.

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Maybe we have different mental models and that’s what drives this conflict? I certainly wouldn’t say that first do this then do that is my primary mental model, in small blocks yes, but once you get past even 1 file that breaks down. Once you introduce threads or the network these assumptions have to go out the window anyways.

It’s funny you mention recipes, because i’ve always been frustrated by traditional recipe descriptions that muddle concurrency and make it difficult to conceptualize the whole process. E.g. the table structure here is superior to step by step http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/158/Dark-Chocolate...

The network is the prime example for forcing serialization of events.

Tbf, I agree with the recipe criticism. Would be neat with a dependency graph instead of a step-by-step list of things to do when baking a cake. Would have saved me a lot of headache in the past. (The table in your link expresses a tree, which is probably sufficient for most purposes.)

> In my experience, software engineers "think" imperatively

I hear this often. In the past the claim used to be that they "think" object-oriented. This is a thinly veiled argumentum ad naturam.

> ... on the functional proponents to prove

Prove your own claims before you demand proofs from other people. And by prove I mean really rigorous thinking, not just superficially seeking confirmation for the things you already believe either way.

A: This thing! It's true!

B: Prove it!

A: No, you prove first! With really rigorous thinking, please!

Bad faith

Not necessarily. If the current "default" is imperative, then the burden of proof is on the functional advocates, because they're the ones advocating for change.

Burden of proof is stupid if the only argument for the other is being the status quo.

Burden of proof is very relevant if neither side gave an argument.

People are doing A. Someone says "Do B instead!". "Why should we do B?" "Well, why should you do A?" At the end of that extremely unproductive exchange, what are people going to do, A or B? They're going to keep doing A, because they were already doing that, and nobody gave them any actual reason to change.

So "burden of proof" isn't meant in the sense of this being a formal debate, with rules. It means that, when ahf8Aithaex7Nai said "Prove your own claims before you demand proofs from other people", that ahf8Aithaex7Nai is wrong. OOP is the current default in terms of the bulk of professional programming; if FP advocates want that to change, it's on the FP advocates to provide reasons, not on the OOP advocates to prove the correctness of the status quo.

Right the status quo works. Computers are serving us. The only question of course is whether rigorous adaptation of FP would make them work even better.

The proponents of status quo only need to prove that the existing approach works and is useful. And I think that is proven already by the very existence of status quo. It wouldn't be there if it wasn't somehow useful.

I mean, OOP is still a very great model for plenty of programs.

In my experience, people think and explain their ideas in natural language and sometimes pictures. So that is the best way to program computers.

Imperative is good (perhaps even better) on a local, small scope.

It is terrible on a system level with concurrent execution, there you really need all the safe guards.

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