> I think Rich is an extremely smart and very accomplished programmer. I think functional programming is really good at some things, I don't feel like many people talk about the things it's not good at.
As someone who used to swear by Ruby but now prefers FP langs, part of learning FP is as much about learning what FP is good at as it is about learning what FP isn't good at. Given FP's proclamation for declarative style and immutability, clearly FP isn't good at domains where imperative styles are important or really, really, really[0] CPU intensive work where mutability is needed.
Although, thanks to compiler research (which is mostly done by FP language users, ahem) languages like OCaml are bridging this gap when you take a look at projects like MirageOS. You get to write your code in a declarative, immutable style that then gets compiled to very fast native code. It's having your cake and eating it, too.
As far as your original complaint of everything in Ruby either being a hash of hashes or a class that just wraps a hash of hashes, I completely agree. That is what drove me away from the language. I'd rather just blow that hash + class relationship up completely. Not to mention, in ML-dialect languages you can use features like Enum/Sum/Product types to define the configuration/syntax of your programs which is a lot better than reading arbitrary keys in a hash, as you have stated.
0 - No, I mean really, really, really, really. "I think I need C to do this fast enough for my use case" is the "I need Cassandra for my 2GB database of 'Big Data'" of the FP world.
As someone who used to swear by Ruby but now prefers FP langs, part of learning FP is as much about learning what FP is good at as it is about learning what FP isn't good at. Given FP's proclamation for declarative style and immutability, clearly FP isn't good at domains where imperative styles are important or really, really, really[0] CPU intensive work where mutability is needed.
Although, thanks to compiler research (which is mostly done by FP language users, ahem) languages like OCaml are bridging this gap when you take a look at projects like MirageOS. You get to write your code in a declarative, immutable style that then gets compiled to very fast native code. It's having your cake and eating it, too.
As far as your original complaint of everything in Ruby either being a hash of hashes or a class that just wraps a hash of hashes, I completely agree. That is what drove me away from the language. I'd rather just blow that hash + class relationship up completely. Not to mention, in ML-dialect languages you can use features like Enum/Sum/Product types to define the configuration/syntax of your programs which is a lot better than reading arbitrary keys in a hash, as you have stated.
0 - No, I mean really, really, really, really. "I think I need C to do this fast enough for my use case" is the "I need Cassandra for my 2GB database of 'Big Data'" of the FP world.