▲ | omcnoe 4 days ago | ||||||||||||||||
The issue regarding academia is that functional programming is treated as an afterthought/sideshow that is mainly of interest for research. Almost no-one is teaching FP concepts to undergrads. | |||||||||||||||||
▲ | uncircle 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
Before 2010-something, the very popular meme in software engineering was that functional programming is really hard to understand, and really not suited for anything outside of academia. [1] Now that I've been programming in an immutable functional language for almost a decade (Elixir), I'm certain the meme was mostly born out of unfamiliarity [2] than actual complexity; it's really not that much different than imperative, just requires a different approach and understanding of the trade-offs. Writing a distributed system (say, a web app backend) in an imperative, mutable language in this day and age is increasingly a laughable proposition in my view. Use the right tool for the problem at hand. Many academically-trained developers never got exposed to FP in school, and to this day you can still hear, albeit in much lesser numbers thanks to the popularity of Elixir/Clojure/etc., the meme of FP being "hard" perpetuated. --- 1: I would go so far as to blame Haskell for the misplaced belief that FP means overcomplicated type theory when all you want is a for loop and a mutable data-structure. 2: I played with OCaml 10+ years ago, and couldn't make head or tails of it. I tried again recently, and it just felt familiar and quite obvious. | |||||||||||||||||
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▲ | pjmlp 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||
I can assure you that wasn't the case on my degree, if anything almost every lecture had its own programming language. Maybe I got lucky being in one of the most relevant universities in Portugal, however I can tell that others in the country strive for similar quality for their graduates, even almost 40 years later. |