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Comment by bdangubic | Hacker News Reader

That isn't natural to anyone who is not intimately familiar with procedural programming.

This is not about "procedural programming" - this is exactly how this works mentally. For kicks I just asked me 11-year old kid to write down names of all the books behind her desk (20-ish) of them and give me names of authors of books that are 200 pages or more. She "procedurally"

1. took a book

2. flipped to last page to see page count

3. wrote the name of the author if page count was more than 20

The procedural is natural, it is clear and it is in the right order

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That's when you're doing the job, not what the mental representation of the solution. I strongly believe if you ask her to describe the task, she would go:

1. (Take the books)->(that have 200 pages or more)->(and mark down the name of the authors)->(only once)

I respectfully disagree. And I think one of the core reason SWEs struggle with functional-style of programming is that it is neither intuitive nor how general-joe-doe’s brain works.

I haven't really encountered software engineers who really struggle with functional style in almost 20 years of seeing it in mainstream languages. It's just another tool that one has to learn.

Even the people arguing against functional style are able to understand it.

Strangely, this argument is quite similar to arguments I encounter when someone wants to rid the codebase of all SQL and replace it with ORM calls.

Strangely, this argument is quite similar to arguments I encounter when someone wants to rid the codebase of all SQL and replace it with ORM calls.

we must be in completely different worlds cause I have yet (close to 30 years now hacking) to see/hear someone trying to introduce ORM on a project which did not start with the ORM to begin with. the opposite though is a constant, “how do we get rid of ORM” :)

I haven't really encountered software engineers who really struggle with functional style in almost 20 years. It's just another tool that one has to learn.

I recall vividly when Java 8 came out (not the greatest example but also perhaps not too bad) having to explain over and over concept of flatMap (wut is that fucking thing?) or even zipping two collections. even to this day I see a whole lot of devs (across several teams I work with) doing “procedural” handling of collections in for loops etc…

I'm more talking about projects that do start with an ORM, but have judicious (and correct) usage of inline SQL for certain parts. It's not uncommon to see developers spending weeks refactoring into an ORM-mess.

The argument is always that "junior developers won't know SQL".

But yeah I've also seen the opposite happening once. People going gung-ho on deleting all ORM code "because there's so much SQL already, why do we need an ORM then".

And then the argument is that "everyone knows SQL, the ORM is niche".

I guess it's a phase that all devs go through in the middle of their careers. They see a hammer and a screwdriver in a toolbox, and feel the need for throwing one away because "who needs more than one tool"...

You are describing how to execute the procedure, while the gp is describing what the result should be. Both are valuable, but they're very different.

My personal take is that "how to execute" is more useful for lower level and finer grained control, which "what the results should be" is better for wrangling complex logic

Your daughter may have implemented it procedurally but your description of the task was functional.

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