I have to agree with today's XKCD about functional programming

[Aristos Queue]

http://xkcd.com/1270/

 

Functional programming is a thing of beauty. Explaining that beauty to those who do not see it is non-trivial. LabVIEW's dataflow isn't functional, but it has many of the same properties, and is a good deal easier to visualize. I find it to be a more-than-acceptable compromise between the ideal computation space and a usable language for actually getting stuff done.

[todd]

"When all the world recognizes beauty as beauty, this in itself is ugliness"

[crelf]

http://xkcd.com/1270/

 

As is oft the case with xkcd, the mouse-over text is perfect.

[todd]

As is oft the case with xkcd, the mouse-over text is perfect.

I had to go back through ALL of them once I "discovered" the mouse-overs.

[Val Brown]

Functional programming is what I "grew up with" as a paradigm so F(x) means almost literally that NOTHING Fxxxx with your x except you...

 

Or at least that's how it was explained to me by a mathematically oriented physicist programmer.....

[hooovahh]

I had to go back through ALL of them once I "discovered" the mouse-overs.

You discovered the mouse-overs?  Sounds like you were one of today's 10,000

 

Relevant XKCD

 

A bit of a stretch but I wanted to see if I could find one.

[todd]

You discovered the mouse-overs?  Sounds like you were one of today's 10,000

 

Relevant XKCD

 

A bit of a stretch but I wanted to see if I could find one.

Definitely was one of 10,000 - but it was a few years ago.

-- Doing my part to be one of the 10,000 every day.

[Yair]

I had to go back through ALL of them once I "discovered" the mouse-overs.

 

There are easier ways...

[JackDunaway]

Functional programming is a thing of beauty.

 

Agree, wholeheartedly.

 

I've pined for the past couple years to apply functional programming to all my application domains. A recent realization is functional programming simply just doesn't map to many problem domains. Key business logic such as actuation and user interaction often blows referential transparency (i'm finding that pure functions are better applicable in purely computational domains; personally, I just don't spend much time here).

 

That said, the quest to eliminate mutable state in hopes of achieving pure functions has, at worst, led to more maintainable code. (Simply -- striving to minimize crossing code boundaries with data, and especially references to data or objects, for all levels of procedural abstractions, down to structures)

 

I've found functional programming and object-oriented programming (see also "pants-oriented clothing") are just two roughly-orthogonal components to the bigger picture -- service- and actor-oriented programming.

 

OMG, AQ, Scala; you're right. All this shit does converge to something useful.

(A CLA Summit that focuses on practical LabVIEW implementations of programming paradigms; that's a CLA Summit I'd go to.)