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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

This has gone on in academia for awhile, you are now considered mainstream if you embrace FP as the way, and you are considered a rebel if you instead believe that OOP is still the way.

I predict that there will eventually be a FP backlash that reverses the situation again (hey, look how easy objects are to use vs. this crazy FP stuff!?).

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Logic programming, the third programming paradigm, will come to the rescue...

Sure, the database junkies will never give that up.

I guess 2020 will be the year of procedural programming then.

Why? Both OOP and FP are supersets of procedural programming, so in any case, it is the year of procedural programming already.

Question - why didn't you seek help in learning FP?

I worked with Martin Odersky team for awhile, and I saw the way...was to use some FP and a lot of the cool OO stuff that Scala provided (traits!). Scala is one of the most advanced OO languages out there.

I'm very familiar with the PLT field, including OO languages like Scala and the history of its development. I was asking precisely because of your work on scalac. Much of your code had to get thrown out/refactored/cleaned up. The impression was that you didn't understand the FP part. Your recent comments on HN reinforce that.

But that's besides the point. I'd like to find out what gaps can be filled so you no longer find FP difficult to understand or use. What material have you tried so far?

That is complete BS, I didn't drink the Kool-Aid and was able to get the job done in a way that didn't use mega pattern matching functions, which are particularly loved by some (especially scalac) but not all. Martin also preferred lazy evaluation over incremental and reactive computation, and that was that. If you look at my recent IDE demoes (on YouTube or just see my papers), you'll see where Scala could have gone vs. where it is now.

The Scala community eventually drifted away from OO, but it could have gone very differently.

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