This is a bizarre essay by someone who understands neither functional programming nor the history of computers.
> To be kind, we’ve spent several decades twisting hardware to make the FP spherical cow work “faster”, at the expense of exponential growth in memory usage, and, some would argue, at the expense of increased fragility of software.
There is not one iota of support for functional programming in any modern CPU.
I would say "sequential execution of CPU instructions" and "O(1) memory access" are two major spherical cows in computing. Probably the biggest, though, is the "fast, reliable network". We build systems that treat networked resources as if they were local: always there and instantly available. Heck, most of our stuff wouldn't even run without the database being online, and that's usually provided over the network.
Calling random things “spiritual cows” is a fine comedy bit, but has no place in a professional environment where you have to be able to communicate with others to achieve a common goal. TFA is just shitposting in blog form. Not sure if the author realizes that.
I’m more DevOps but we have issues wear we discuss the spherical cow of build pipelines like we have a handful of static environments in the same cloud account with the same permissions and database requirements that does not stand up to encountering the actual requirements where we have destructible and static environments, an environment in a different cloud account for our customer to review per contract requirements, and a prod environment with heavy security and data protection requirements hosted by a entirely different cloud vendor with bad infrastructure support resources.
At least most functional language tutorial claim to be based on abstract machines, not like the C language, which is a spherical cow that people not often aware of. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 52.8 ms ] thread> To be kind, we’ve spent several decades twisting hardware to make the FP spherical cow work “faster”, at the expense of exponential growth in memory usage, and, some would argue, at the expense of increased fragility of software.
There is not one iota of support for functional programming in any modern CPU.