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Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

In a world of circular time, not linear time, all syntactic sugar, or all fads in general, naturally rotate endlessly thru:

"You'd be crazy to use that"

"Um, OK"

"Often, I use it"

"Everyone must be forced to exclusively use it"

"Sometimes its sucks, but its the only sane thing to do"

And then right back to start. Endlessly. Forever.

So in 2014 OO is rapidly nearing the "you're nuts" and I see functional is rapidly nearing the "I use it" with, inevitably, "Everyone must be forced to exclusively use it" coming up soon. The relevant point is, have we started preparing for functional fundamentalism or whatever you want to call it? Also have we started scrubbing our resumes and githubs to remove the stain of OO programming?

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Personally I like OOP and I think a lot of its criticism is flawed, since the OOP flavor that most people are exposed to nowadays is Java's OOP. And personally, whenever I see class names suffixed with "Executor", "Manager", or anything really that ends with "er" and "or", I feel like puking.

Besides, the state in which we are in is rather healthy. Back in the late nineties, early 2000, everybody was into class-based designs described with UML.

And I do wish people were forced to use functional programming, because that's the only way many people end up learning something new. OOP is not the best choice for every problem. Sometimes a function is better than an ExecutorManager. Sometimes a Map or a type-class are better than an inheritance chain. Sometimes a monad is better for manipulating data streams instead of iterators. And so on and so forth.

Also, the Gang of Four is seriously outdated.

> Besides, the state in which we are in is rather healthy. Back in the late nineties, early 2000, everybody was into class-based designs described with UML.

UML is great as collaboration mechanism at the enterprise level across sites.

> Also, the Gang of Four is seriously outdated.

Still largely unknown on the enterprise, sadly.

Ah, the mythical enterprise. I've yet to see an example in which UML Class Diagrams have been useful, but whatever, I guess that's the same enterprise in which you've got "architects" outlining stuff in UML, then passing that to the monkeys to fill in the blanks.

I see them in all multisite projects using offshoring.

I find UML Class diagrams useful for a one-look document describing the overall architecture of a piece of software. Where they are weak is that you really do need a couple of paragraphs of plain English describing each class as well, and there's not really anywhere to put that on a UML Class diagram. The other really useful diagram in UML is the sequence diagram. If you write out the Sequence diagrams for a few key processes in your software, you've gone along way towards giving a roadmap to people that need to get in and modify the code. These are both documentation use-cases though. Using UML as a design tool (other than very informally on a whiteboard) seems wrong to me.

Although that may be true, I didn't really read the article as saying that OOP is bad, just that it brings a lot of extra baggage that newcomers to programming needn't worry about. Certainly as they begin to write more advanced programs, more advanced paradigms become relevant.

But the term 'functional programming' is perhaps even less clear than 'object-oriented programming'. Is a language that can pass a function 'as data' a functional language? Does it need to support tail recursion elimination? Does it need to be pure? Does it need to support algebraic datatypes? Should everything be an expression?

I am also not sure if programming trends follow circular time. I haven't seen logic programming making a big return and OO and FP are still in its first cycle. It just took FP ages to go from stage 1 to 3 (outside niches).

HoF is functional nature. The rest just help things along that path. I'm not sure why people get so hyper about classifying things. The map is not the territory. Where you draw lines has no bearing on how easy it is to attain functional style in a language.

FP is far more clear a concept than OOP. OOP has no real fundamentals apart from encapsulation, which really isn't specific to OOP. OOP is whatever haphazard setup a language designer feels like using. FP concepts (like the ones you mentioned) are pretty clear across languages.

FP is certainly in its first cycle; ML just keeps going on. Industry is only now catching on.

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