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I went into this expecting it to be a criticism in the context of low-level systems, and was a bit surprised when it ended up being about distributed. The mismatch the author is describing, I think, is not really about functional programmers so much as everyone not working directly on modern distributed or web software. For being upfront about all the ways distributed programming is different, this is actually one of the best intros I have seen for the non-distributed programmer on what distributed programming is really like.

I still want to believe that future programming languages will be capable of tackling these issues, but exploring the design space will require being cognizant of those issues in the first place.





It’s about a specific branch of functional programming that values an almost mathematical rigor, though (like Haskell).

I don’t think the criticism of the author applies LISP-style functional programming, which is much more accommodating to embracing chaos.


Yeah no, that criticism of Haskell is nonsense.

It wasn’t intended as criticism of Haskell at all, I love that language. I have a whole bunch of open source Haskell projects under my name.

It was intended as a criticism of the article, that its whole assumption “FP == making invalid states impossible to represent” is incorrect.

I recognize that it’s very much possible to embrace chaos with Haskell, and I should probably have worded that better.


Utterly ridiculous.

In Haskell you can “embrace chaos” exactly as much as you desire. It’s a general purpose programming language.




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