11/14/2011 09:58:10 PM EST

There is no functional programming bandwagon. Functional programming does sometimes influence mainstream programming. But overall, for more than 50 years, mainstream programmers *always* prefer a non-functional language. If you have tried to write non-academic program in a functional language, you'll know that they present all kinds of hassles when dealing with simple things like files and file systems. These things break the "no side effects" principle of functional programming, a principle that doesn't exist in the real world. Functional programming can be good to simplify really complex problems, such as airline ticket pricing and route planning, but from typical business applications, functional programming is much more difficult than with procedural and object-oriented languages.

United Statesdev danke

11/25/2011 05:51:19 PM EST

"21st century's signature contribution to mainstream prograsmming: unit testing." What? Unit testing has been around forever (or at least for the 40 years I have been in the business).

United StatesMark

12/02/2011 01:41:05 PM EST

@Dev: It seems to me that there _is_ an FP bandwagon: the influence in the .NET world is clear, with LINQ being a prime driver of the evolution of the .NET languages. In the Java world, I feel that there is industry motion towards Scala as the best "next Java." @Mark: Yes, unit-testing has been "around" forever, but it has only become a mainstream development practice in the 00s. In the 90s or before, I would be surprised and happy to find a test-suite embedded in a source-code tarball (especially a _unit_ test suite), today, I would be surprised to check out a new codebase and _not_ find such a suite. The shift in expectations about testing and quality is, to me, the "signature" shift in the programming zeitgeist in the 00s. Unit-testing was downright rare back in the days of statically-linked single-entry-point programs.

United StatesLarry O'Brien

12/02/2011 01:58:00 PM EST

@Dev: As to whether FP is "superior" to OOP when it comes to mainstream enterprise development, or only excels in the algorithmic realms, I think that's a _HUGE_ debate that the industry needs to have. My old construction was "LISP has been touted in academia for 40 years and _everyone_ abandons it when they move into industry. Maybe that has some significance?" But as I've tried to say in these 2 columns, it seems to me that "FP approaches" (state externalized into parameters, functional rather than structural composition, etc.) have become more commonplace for totally pragmatic reasons. I think that has "primed the pump" as it were and I think that FP (an old concept) is about to be discovered anew and everyone's going to shout "silver bullet! silver bullet!" Regrettably, what I can anticipate that if some of us with gray hair say "Well, you know, it's fine, but it's not magic..." we're going to be dismissed as "not getting it."

United StatesLarry O'Brien