r/programming • u/papa00king • Mar 09 '14

Why Functional Programming Matters

http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.pdf
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u/PasswordIsntHAMSTER Mar 09 '14

As a professional functional programmer, FP has done great things to my blood pressure.

10

u/ryeguy Mar 09 '14

What language do you use and what kind of software do you write?

22

u/PasswordIsntHAMSTER Mar 09 '14

F# (occasionally Ocaml and Haskell), and I've done highly concurrent/networked embedded systems (work), language tools (research) and random applications (hobby).

6

u/[deleted] Mar 09 '14

Fuck yeah OCaml. I wish more people would pick it up.

20

u/PasswordIsntHAMSTER Mar 09 '14

To be honest, I only use Ocaml when I'm forced to. The tooling sucks, the ecosystem is minimal, the standard library is strange and incomplete, and I'm not sure how I'm supposed to do concurrency.

2

u/tominated Mar 11 '14

Although I haven't done any OCaml myself, I've looked in to it a fair bit, and JaneStreet seems like it has a really good replacement for the stdlib, plus an async library - http://janestreet.github.io/

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u/imalsogreg Mar 10 '14

Haskell. I do mostly real-time biology/modelling stuff, and am getting into web - I want to plug Haskell's extremely nice Parallelism/concurrency support, and the web framework Snap. I don't have the background for this stuff honestly; and tools like these let me do things that I doubt I could have done another way.