It’s hard to learn, but your code will produce fewer nasty surprises

Community Picks is a section on daily.dev where our community members share the most interesting and valuable content they've discovered online. From insightful articles to handy tools, every post is a gem curated by our dedicated coomunity. To contribute to Community Picks, you need to have at least 250 reputation points, ensuring that only active and trusted members can share their finds.

Community Picks

In the late 1960s, a programming paradigm emerged that aimed to improve the quality of code while reducing the development time needed. Shira Inbar: With functional programming, less is more a good way to understand the rationale for functional programming is by considering something that happened more than a half century ago.

Why Functional Programming Should Be the Future of Software Development

With functional programming, less is more

Functional programming has a steep learning curve

I think we’re just bouncing from one extreme (imperative and OOP) to another (pure functional). Eventually we’ll settle somewhere in the middle.
By the way, this article is pointless…

Soooooo… my 2 cents is that we shouldn’t push anything for being the future of development considering how rapidly technology changes and evolves. Stop trying to die by your sword or on your hill or however that saying goes because newsflash… when that change happens the rest of us will move on while you are still arguing how a depreciated way of coding is the future and we will leave you behind :)

I can also really recommend Clojure and Elm.

FP is good to leverage whenever applicable, but a pure approach is not the way to go in most cases. IMO, declarative code, single responsibility, referential transparency, high-order functions, composition, etc are extremely useful concepts, not to mention reactiveness for streams and messaging, but other stuff like ADTs and category theory have a very steep learning curve most businesses are not willing to pay.

I don’t see pure functional paradigms gain the libraries and components used by the majority of the IT world any time soon. A few years ago there was an “article” about SQL doing away with NULL. It was published on the first of April and was indeed an April fool’s joke.
Interestingly, we still use GOTO in scripts - both SQL scripts and also shell scripts. Even the best tool in the hands of the mediocre craftsman will still produce sub-optimal results.
I’m a developer who yearns to also be good at graphic design. Perhaps now - with AI based visual design capabilities, I will be able to design something that doesn’t look like a computer nerd got hold of Adobe Photoshop and went to town, producing something that although functional in the broadest sense of the word, but lacks one crucial ingredient, talent.
Ultimately - good software is the result of a combination of knowing the theory, having superior skills (or talent,) and consistent discipline in applying best practice throughout.