Functional programming vs. "OO" programming (or, How to entirely miss the point) (developerdotstar.com)

9 points by jkush ↗ HN
Summed up:

...I can give my impressions of the funtional aspects of what I call free-floating functions.

What I mean by a free-floating function is a function that is not tied to a class. For example:

doSomething(thingToDo);

as opposed to

ThingDoer.doSomething(thingToDo);

The thing I've never liked about languages that allow free-floating functions is that they lead to sloppiness and confusion. Where does the magic non-name-spaced function exist? How can I access it? What do I need to import/include to get to it? What happens if there are different doSomething() funcions I want to use?

11 comments

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The first several comments to the article are definitely worth reading.
I don't have an account and hence can't see the comments... mind pasting the good bits here for me?
The comments look like more blog posts, scroll down a bit and you'll see them.
Oh, yeah I didn't even read them... just assumed they were other posts.

feels dumb

(comment deleted)
This falls into the category of being "not even wrong".
Hi, I'm looking for the vote-article-down button. Has anyone seen him? I really, REALLY need to talk to him...
I just realized that "(or, How to entirely miss the point)" is from the point of view of the submitter, not the article.

Why submit an article written by someone who criticizes that which he doesn't even grasp the basics of when you're fully aware of his irrelevance?

Because it's...funny?

Actually, it's not funny at all. His attitude is a perfect example of how many 9-5 programmers act when faced with functional programming.

If he was a .NET developer he'd be using the new functional features of .NET 2.0 and greater in the same old imperative way and would just continue to miss the point.

I guess the reason why I thought this worthy of being posted was not to make fun of this guy personally, but to use his kind of thinking as an example.

Is that uncharitable of me?

If you think it is, then you'd probably downvote all the dailywtf.com submissions, too. Right?

This must be sarcastic, right?
"I can't speak to the affect of one programming language or another on the way people think [...] my language is Java [...]"

Ahhh, there it is.