Ask HN: How has functional programming influenced your thinking?

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a) Insight: Side-effects can often be avoided, and sometimes it’s a good thing to do so, even when not writing programs in a purely functional style.

b) To me, functional programming was tremendeously useful when learning to program. Not sure exactly why, but it clicked with the way my brain works.

Functional programming has instilled in me a belief that I call "You don't have to punch yourself in the face."

The premise is this: you have two arms and two hands. They can be used in a controlled manner to do lots of useful things. They can also be swung around in a wild fashion that results in punching yourself in the face.

The concepts functional programming rallies against, like mutable state, are like arms: useful in certain circumstances, dangerous in others. But that's the thing: You don't have to write code in a dangerous way. You don't have to punch yourself in the face. That is to say, functional programming has reinforced my belief in the imperative style of programming.

Avoiding side effects is great, it allows you to construct big programs by reasoning about the parts that make them.

FP also taught me a lot about types, which allow me to define even better the parts that construct big programs.

I don’t think any technique is inherently bad: imperative, global variables, and even “goto” can be used wisely to solve problems.

Functional programming (similarly type systems) is another great technique to use when you have constraints that you’d like to be automatically enforced by the compiler (referential transparency, equational reasoning, etc.)

When I have to use a language that doesn’t allow expressing problems functionally when that would be the ideal expression of it, I feel I’m using the wrong tool for the job.

ad-hoc abstraction is the secret sauce that destroys code bases in the long run and makes things horrendously complex. Composition based on mathematics is more likely to survive years of serving as atomic elements than anything based on ad-hoc human intuition

Composition is hard

Mostly in avoiding mutation and imperative loops, etc.

It’s mostly things at this level, and not larger structural things. I don’t understand (and probably never will) the whole dance around using monads for side effects, aka the entire reason we run software in the first place. Your problem is “I want to update the database” and someone starts talking about stuff like “bind” and “shift”. Now you have two problems.

The value of values: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

Having values and having your program phrased as transformations of values makes for straight forward, easily tested code. Provide inputs, assert outputs.

Yeah. My functions work with data that is received in parameters. Classes are for dependency injection composition and hold state data only when absolutely necessary.

It did not.

For me, functional programming permits better means of reasoning about the flow of data through software systems. You always know how variables came to have the values they do, because they were passed into the function that way. This reasoning extends back up the call stack. It makes debugging much easier and therefore cheaper than with OOP for example. I think a functional approach is just more predictable generally.

It is what got me into writing code. I've tried low-level imperative programming in C which wasn't for me, I never seemed to find object oriented programming intuitive.

What was my frame for reference was piping input and output in bash programming and various declarative DSL like SQL or the Hashicorp language, functional programming in Clojure seemed quite productive and grokable, so I dove into that.

I did work in Scala for a few years. We employed Cats[1], and even a bit of Matryoshka[2] though most of the work I do today is in Python.

Nowadays I think about computational requirements in terms of relations among behavioral dependencies. Like, "I want to perform operation O on input A and return a B. To do this, I'll need a way to a -> b and a way to b -> b -> b." I often pass these behavioral dependencies in as arguments and it tends to make the inner core of my programs pretty abstract and built up as layers of specificity.

Zooming out nearly all the way, it makes me feel tethered in a qualitatively unique way to certain deep truths of the universe. In a Platonic sense, invoking certain ideas like a monad make me feel like I'm approaching the divine or at least one instantiation of a timeless universal that operates outside of material existence.

I'd imagine some mathematicians might see the universe in a similar way - one where immortal relations between ontological forms exist beyond time and space and at the same time can be threaded through the material world by intellectual observation and when those two meet a beautiful collision occurs.

1. https://typelevel.org/cats/

2. https://github.com/precog/matryoshka

I enjoy simple mappings of input to outputs.

For tree based processing functional programming Ocaml and Haskell are meant to be very effective. Especially if you can think of your problem as a functional isomorphism.

When I created my toy database I used a pipeline of tuples that were reduced. Relational data is easy to process with functional ideas.

Clojure pipelines are similar.

My problem with functional programming is its readability. If someone had a different idea of how they would approach the problem functionally, it can be tricky to read the code that performs the functional mapping.

I wrote mostly python and c languages before I knew anything about FP. Part of the appeal is how mathematical it is, so intuition from math and physics modeling can carry over more easily for some people. lazy evaluation and currying as in haskel are powerful ideas that can influence how problems are broken down conceptually. Earlier on i thought of a well-written large program like an octopus with a complicated brain in the middle and many tentacles coming from the body. Now i aim for programs that are more like a green onion with a clear flow from root to bulb to shoot, and elegant in their simplicity. I still mostly write python and c++, but banishing side effects where possible for example has led code that paralellizes more easily and is easier to debug.

It influenced my thinking in the realization that programming is much about a culture as it is about a technology. Functional programming should succeed as something that makes difficult work easier, but a lot of FP advocates want it to be the opposite of that. For a brief period, I too thought, "Hey, I can learn this stuff and then I'll get to work with smarter people!"

Smart doesn't work that way. Shame on me for not learning the same lesson from OOP. These are good technologies, but toxic culture undoes all the good and more.

End result: We can't have nice things, because the arguments are bogus.

I've tried to dabble in functional programming but I guess I'm not mathematical enough to "get it". I can see how it works, I did some toy projects in Haskell and Elixir but it just didn't really pull me in. For the record I code mostly in C for embedded and bare metal or just pure automation for other stuff.

It certainly helped me formulate problems as data transformation problems which are solved very neatly with functional programming.

It is much more enjoyable working with immutable data structures which tends to remove long distance dependencies from your code. Instead, decisions are made locally and results passed up vs directly changing state in an object graph.

Not all problems are easily turned into a pipeline of pure functions, but it is worthwhile to learn which category of problems can.

Lean a Lisp. It will up your game.

Paired with types, it has helped me when (and how) to split code and data, and how keeping clear boundaries between them and using pure functions when possible makes everything better: less cognitive overhead, easier tests, better data structures.

Mostly negatively. The beautiful code that you produce by functional programming will always make you aware of how bad most programming languages are. I took Ocaml in university and I was completely and utterly blown away.

You just know deep down whenever you touch JS or some other language that there exists a better way of programming.

My biggest takeaway was something I never before thought was even possible - to create a program without any variables. It turns out you can do a whole lot without any variables.

Through that I understood that the state of a program what causes most of the confusion and without variables reasoning about the code becomes much simpler. Without state everything becomes nice.

Through that I understood that state is the enemy, and global state is the greatest enemy of understanding. Later I realized that this same principle strongly aligns with testable code as more state is what makes code less testable.

It also forced me to use a lot of recursion which is nice as I understood it much better than in that single "Fibonacci number" example.

I also learned to write code that can safely run in parallel as functions without side effects and state are the most ideal candidates for that.

In Python or Javascript, I look for opportunities to use pipe() or pipeeither() [1] wherever possible. These crop up a lot -- CLI scripts, data processing lambdas, etc.

A quick and dirty pipeither() with a "poor mans" either monad and you get a lot of the benefits of pure, testable functions, easy maintenance and debugging etc.

It's not Haskell, but its good.

[1]

    const pipelineeither = function (l) {
      const pipelineeither = function (v) {
        let [left, right] = [null, v];
        for (const f of l) {
          if (left !== null) break;
          [left, right] = f(right);
        }
        return [left, right];
      };
      return pipelineeither;
    };

    def pipeeither(l):
        def pipeeither(v):
            return reduce(lambda a, e: e(a[1]) if a[0] is None else a, l, (None, v))
        return pipeeither

I don't really understand what it's for or why I'd use it. I don't "get" immutable variables. Anyone I ask for an explanation just says "but it means that if you do something to the variable it doesn't change the value for other parts of the program" which just seems a bit daft to me.

What's an actual concrete use case of this? Where specifically would I use immutable variables to make my code better?

The vast majority of challenges, bugs, complexity, and performance issues in software engineering can be reduced to managing state. State is hard. Immutable state solves a lot of these issues in theory, but in practice mutable state is the tradeoff you must make in many cases to get acceptable performance. The cost of this tradeoff is the increased complexity cost.

A good engineer understands the sweet spot of these tradeoffs. Use functional techniques with immutable data structures in the right places where performance is unlikely to become an issue.