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Comment by thmpp | Hacker News Reader

The challenges mentioned on the article are challenges that are known to every larger distributed system. They are not challenges solved or to be solved by functional programming.

But the solutions and tools functional programming provides help to have higher verifiability, fewer side effects and more compile-time checks of code in the deployment unit. That other challenges exists is fully correct. But without a functional approach, you have these challenges plus all others.

So while FP is not a one-size-fits-all solution to distributed systems challenges, it does help solve a subset of the challenges on a single system level.

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> They are not challenges solved or to be solved by functional programming.

These challenges can be solved by the usual tools of FP, but this requires each version of the system to be explicitly aware of the data schema varieties used by all earlier versions that are still in use. Then it's a matter of interpreting earlier-versioned data correctly, and translating data to earlier schema varieties whenever they may have to be interpreted by earlier versions of the code.

(It may also be helpful to introduce minimally revised releases of the earlier codes, that simply add some amount of forward compatibility re: dealing with later-released schemas, while broadly keeping all other behavior the same to avoid unwanted breakage. These approaches are not too hard to implement.)

This. The thesis statement is so confused and I cannot tell if it's deliberate clickbait or the author legitimately is that confused about the distinction between program-level language features and program structure and systems design and how they are two closely related but really distinct things.

The distinction is the point and the subject matter of the article.

Literally the second section:

> Here is the central claim: the unit of correctness in production is not the program. It is the set of deployments.

The thesis essentially boils down to: functional programing paradigm, type systems, strong interfaces, etc, are all fantastic tools for ensuring the correctness of a program, but the system is not a program, and so these tools are necessary but not sufficient to ensure the correctness of a distributed application.

This makes no sense at all really.

It’s convoluted because it’s slop. You can’t even be sure the text came out as intended. It is full of GPT style markers that tell me the author wasn’t careful enough in review. Jolting bullets in markdown and asking for a full article is not good enough for publication. It’s today’s version of let me google that for you. No one publishes half ass markdown notes for a reason. Asking LLM to finish it doesn’t cut it.

None of that is remotely true.

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