u/vnearherein r/Clojure • Recommends
Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? – Richard Feldman
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#functionalprogramming#oop#elm
Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? – Richard Feldman
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9K subscribers • 19 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 15 people: 12 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters, 1 in engineering communities and 1 curated list.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2019 to 2025.
- Presented by Richard Feldman, member of the Elm core team
- An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
1.6M views7 years ago15 recommendations
Programming languagesSoftware designFunctional programmingLanguage design and type systemsHistory of computing
Richard Feldman explores the historical and social reasons why object-oriented programming became the industry standard over functional programming.
Richard is a member of the Elm core team, the author of Elm in Action from Manning Publications, and the instructor for the Intro to Elm and Advanced Elm courses on Frontend Masters. He's been writing Elm since 2014, and is the maintainer of several open-source Elm packages including elm-test and elm-css packages.Why it's here
15 people recommend thisWhat people say. Highly recommended for its insightful historical analysis of programming language adoption and why OOP became dominant.
jussion Lobsters • Recommends
Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? Talk by Richard Feldman
seeron Hacker News • Recommends
On “Functional programming in C++ (2012)”
…is a vast swathes of computational problems. And its so damn elegant. A lot of examples are thrown around were a bunch of lambda calculus can result in 10-20 fold reduction in source code size. So where’s the catch?There has to be something wrong right? Well recently I stumbled upon a clojure conf talk that tried to tackle precisely this question. link to this video The short of it is that its more of a historical inertia and chance than any specific hidden gotcha. Fascinating talk.…
yewenjieon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Functional programming is not popular because it is weird (2016)”
This talk by Richard Feldman is an excellent discussion about why Functional Programming is not the norm - link to this video
programming-talkscurated list on GitHubRecommends
Under “Functional Programming”
Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? 00:46:08 by **Richard Feldman** (2019) A
quickthrower2on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Why are private/hidden methods so popular in OOP APIs?”
I know the answer, thanks to watching a recent video by Richard Feldman on why functional programming isn’t popular yet. I recommend watching it for some interesting talk about programming languages in general, it’s on YouTube at link to this video Anyway what privates give you is what everyone wants from a programming language: modularity. We want to be able to expose an api to some code and for it to have some inner workings that we don’t see because: 1. If we know they can’t be touched we have some implicit guarantees about our program. E.g. the mouse pointer cannot go off screen even if we try to make a call to do that. 2. It is simpler for a programmer to understand the api which might be 1% of th…
fulafelon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Why is functional programming not more popular?”
In the market of ideas, there usually isn't any reason that makes the good ideas unpopular. That's the default outcome. Some good ideas eventually make it to mainstream / conventional wisdom because there's some second factor that brings them to the spotlight. For languages it might be a killer app, big corporate investment, etc. In link to this video Richard Feldman puts up a (well founded IMO) argument that OO became accidentally popular because of C++. C++ didn't do OO well, nor was OO the main benefit of C++, it just happened to be something that came with C++.
huy-nguyenon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?”
“Why isn’t functional programming the norm?” by Richard Feldman. Spoiler: not on the basis of merits. link to this video “React to the future” by Jordan Walke. Why ReasonML is a logical extension of ReactJS’ programming paradigm. link “Typing the untyped: soundness in gradual type systems” by Ben Weissmann. The trade offs that various gradual type systems make based on their language constraints. link “Let’s program like it’s 1999” by Lee Byron. How the mutual feedback loop of abstraction, syntax and mental model drives the evolution of web technologies. link
agentultraon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Haskell Problems for a New Decade”
> If in the next fifty years more than, say, 3% of programmers will be programming in a language like Lean, I will eat my hat. You're not even putting any stakes on the table. That's such a safe bet. It's unlikely you'd even have a chance at losing the odds are so stacked. There's a great talk on why functional programming is not the norm: link to this video The short of it is: network effects . Haskell, OCaml, SML... they've never had the benefit of being the exclusive language to a popular platform like the web, macOS, or UNIX. They've not yet had a killer app like Rails or Numpy/SciPy/PyTorch. They've certainly not been foisted on the market with a war chest of marketing dollars like Java and C#. An…
agentultraon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Why is OOP still so widely spread?”
…ed in their continued adoption and success. Platform exclusivity : some companies push their own language ecosystems on their platforms and those languages are often OOP/multi-paradigm languages. Specifically to OOP we have to ask why is the particular style of C++/Java OOP the norm? Why didn't Eiffel, Smalltalk, or Self reach the same market? 0 link to this video edit : forgot the link -- oops.…
blunteon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Casey Muratori on getting rid of OOP mindset [video]”
Keep in mind that what may seem like "personality fit" may be more related to "learned imperative programming first". As an analogy, depending on which spoken language a person learned first (as a child, _automatically), learning some new languages may be particularly difficult or quite natural. If we had all learned functional programming concepts first, our minds would be trained to think that way. We all learned functional (declarative) math, and we don't even think about it as such. It's just math. This video gives some plausible explanations as to why imperative programming is more common than functional: link to this video
rg111on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Functional programming is not popular because it is weird (2016)”
I recently watched this talk- Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? ( link to this video ) Here's the HN thread- link I learned in that talk, among other things that Oracle spent $500 million to promote and market Java. - link - link - link
randitoon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: The Crystal programming language – what are your impressions?”
There's a great talk -- link to this video -- Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? – Richard Feldman -- that goes into this. It's a discussion of "why" programming languages succeed.
senandon Hacker News • Recommends
On “What’s so great about functional programming anyway?”
That doesn't mean the imperative languages are "better", though, just more popular. I recommend the following video titled "Why isn't Functional Programming the Norm?": link to this video
ah27182on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?”
I felt that some of your questions, as well as the general history of popular programming languages, were well laid out in this talk: link to this video TL;DW: The presenter mentions that Python experienced a slow but consistent growth trend, leading to its current prominence. Other points he highlighted about its success align with much of the sentiment expressed here.
eductionon Hacker News • Recommends
On “A Tour of the Lisps”
This is a great talk on exactly this topic from a Clojure conference, if you want a long answer. It focuses on the “functional” feature of Clojure but all of it applies to the whole language (and probably any good lisp) IMO. link to this video My brief text answer (focused on Clojure): -python has been around about 20 more years than Clojure -the advantages of Clojure vs python/etc probably aren’t nearly as big as python vs a non memory managed, compiled, static language like C. That whole generation of “scripting” languages had the wind at their backs in a way Clojure and its contemporaries never quite will (though Clojure et al tend to be much better at concurrency and parallelism and this will help…