Hacker News Reader

Comment by weareconvo | Hacker News Reader

In all of this, let us never forget: "Functional Programming" is a great lens through which to look at a large class of problems... but it is never the goal. Code re-use is the goal. FP and OOP are just means to that end.

View on HN

Code reuse also seems like an intermediate goal to me...

If you want to be precise about it, "the goal" is specific to each human being. I would hope it's something like "Make the world a better place" though.

"Code re-use is the goal. FP and OOP are just means to that end."

I think that both of you are right, to some extent. Code reuse is a goal, because it's better than writing everything anew every time you need some functionality. But it's not a long term goal, because sooner or later, it turns out that the code you have is insufficiently abstract, and you have to replace it with something more generic. I don't think that the level of genericity and abstraction available in mainstream languages is up to the task of making long-time code reuse an appropriate goal. VPRI-style "'runnable math' specifications" seem like the way to go, but how many people program that way?

Code reuse isn't the point of OOP. It may be a goal you personally have when you're writing code in OOP style, but AFAIK it was not Alan Kay's overriding goal when he coined the term. It was more about promoting clean, well-factored program designs. Reuse just happens to fall out of that more readily than bad program designs.

I edited my post to make it clear that that was a quote. :-) I also think that in case of OOP, it's an incidental outcome. (Efficient code reuse clearly needs more than just to have your program have a message-passing based architecture.)

A good point, well-made. I would edit my post, but I don't have much to add to your reply.

Of course, though I and many others would claim that FP is far better at achieving that goal in almost all cases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com