this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Scala
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No, as it happens I think pure-functional is over-hyped too, except for specific massively parallel tasks. I'm not an expert on any programming ecosystem, I'm a climate scientist who codes a complex future-scenarios model and like the multi-paradigm nature of scala, with a lot working out of the box, without many dependencies. Scala's sophisticated type system catches most errors, so I don't have to run loads of tests like the python people do, yet with Scala3 syntax it's even more readable than python, and just works in the browser through scala.js (it helps js and scala share a lot of concepts). It’s a pity we have cycles initial hype - disappointment - slow but steady fixing - then obscurity so just when everything starts to works well, people move away to next hype.
I note the lemmy devs are working on converting their gui from react to rust too - let's see if this works out - but maybe it's too low-level a language for this.
A propos, I actually find that the biggest win of FP is somewhat orthogonal to it, and that's immutability. This leads to the ability to reason locally about code which is IMO completely invaluable even outside of parallelism scenarios. When you don't know if a method might be mutating a parameter without actually reading all the way down it's a real PITA 😅 (I have been doing a lot of refactoring of a large codebase recently and this has been a serious issue)
For sure, this has been something I learned from working in Scala that has made my code in other projects much more readable and easier to reason about. For performance reasons I may need to use mutables, but often I can keep it in the context of the function and just encapsulate it.
I don't do pure FP, but do value the scala concept to write immutable by default unless there's a good reason not to (usually efficiency, inner-loop stuff). While refactoring old code (most was originally java) I gradually convert vars to vals, but the old mutable code still works too, it's multi-paradigm. What matters most for reasoning is readability, scala3 really helps with this.