Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium
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Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium
 
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I know, I know, functional programming is as fun as hitting your head with a brick. But this article does a nice job of showing how functional programming is very Self-like: https://me dium.com/@kentcdodds/classes-complexity-and-functional-programming-a8dd86903747It's objects and functions all the way down, and for me the best is no `this`. It is a bit scary letting go of "central control" Classes provide, very human. I mean, who's *boss*? Do any of us *use* functional programming? -- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium
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Can't resist. I've been in love with functional programming for years. I teach an introductory Haskell class. My goal is to get students to think at a higher level that functional programming facilitates. P.S. The link in Owen's message wasn't created properly. Here's a correction: https://medium.com/@kentcdodds/classes-complexity-and-functional-programming-a8dd86903747 On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 9:19 AM Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
-- Russ Abbott Professor, Computer Science California State University, Los Angeles ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium
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In reply to this post by Owen Densmore
"I know, I know, functional programming is as fun as hitting your head with a brick."
It is fun!
"It is a bit scary letting go of "central control" Classes provide, very human. I mean, who's *boss*?"
The caller is the boss. With FP you know that arguments are all read-only. This gives you unambiguous dataflow and you know when parallelism can be done because the arguments just tell you.
let c = f(a)
..can run at once with..
let d = g(a)
..but not with..
let e = h(a,c)
Also "=" here isn't assignment, it is equality.
If I have a project that isn't FP, I make it into an FP project because it is the right thing to do.
Marcus
From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Owen Densmore <[hidden email]>
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2017 10:19:05 AM To: Wedtech; Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium
I know, I know, functional programming is as fun as hitting your head with a brick.
But this article does a nice job of showing how functional programming is very Self-like:
https://me
dium.com/@kentcdodds/classes-complexity-and-functional-programming-a8dd86903747
It's objects and functions all the way down, and for me the best is no `this`.
It is a bit scary letting go of "central control" Classes provide, very human. I mean, who's *boss*?
Do any of us *use* functional programming?
-- Owen
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium
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In reply to this post by Owen Densmore
It is really not a big change from classes. If you already have objects, often all you have to change is that you return them. Object-oriented languages implicitly have the notion of the object as a first argument, so you've got a container to work with.
The job of higher level code is to assemble and disassemble what is returned in a reasonable way. Perhaps it involves folds/reductions or perhaps it is just bigger containers. This gives a good (and, in FP, necessary) opportunity to think about how to manage
dependencies. And yes, you have to start thinking in terms of `custody' of objects rather than `ownership'. One of the recent trends in web app development are `reactive' services. These ideas came from the FP community.
Marcus From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Owen Densmore <[hidden email]>
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2017 10:19:05 AM To: Wedtech; Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium
I know, I know, functional programming is as fun as hitting your head with a brick.
But this article does a nice job of showing how functional programming is very Self-like:
https://me
dium.com/@kentcdodds/classes-complexity-and-functional-programming-a8dd86903747
It's objects and functions all the way down, and for me the best is no `this`.
It is a bit scary letting go of "central control" Classes provide, very human. I mean, who's *boss*?
Do any of us *use* functional programming?
-- Owen
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: [WedTech] Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium
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In reply to this post by Owen Densmore
FWIW: I’ve been programming and teaching in R for quite a while, and have recently started working in Elixir (based on the Erlang virtual machine and process model) for web application development. The two languages have application spaces that are quite distinct.
. . . Bob
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium
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In reply to this post by Owen Densmore
Interesting timing. Although I don't do much software development these days, I've been fiddling around with Clojure off and on for the last few years. I conceptually like the ideas behind it, but it takes immutability to more of an extreme than I feel is necessary (e.g. unless you use its software transactional memory constructs, there is no way to re-bind a local variable). Also, the programming environment with the most advanced support for it is emacs, and I haven't drank enough koolaid to grok it fully. So, just last night I decided to download Racket (a scheme dialect with a nice simple IDE). So far, I have been having a blast with it. Part of the reason I downloaded it is that I wanted to run programs from the book "The Little Schemer", which among other things is a crash course on replacing iterating and mutating of data structures with purely functional recursive solutions. On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 11:19 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium
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"I conceptually like the ideas behind it, but it takes immutability to more of an extreme than I feel is necessary (e.g. unless you use its software transactional memory constructs, there is no way to re-bind a local variable)."
In Haskell, if this is needed, one uses the State Monad.
From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]>
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2017 2:04:44 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium Interesting timing. Although I don't do much software development these days, I've been fiddling around with Clojure off and on for the last few years. I conceptually like the ideas behind it, but it takes immutability to more of an extreme than
I feel is necessary (e.g. unless you use its software transactional memory constructs, there is no way to re-bind a local variable). Also, the programming environment with the most advanced support for it is emacs, and I haven't drank enough koolaid to grok
it fully. So, just last night I decided to download Racket (a scheme dialect with a nice simple IDE). So far, I have been having a blast with it. Part of the reason I downloaded it is that I wanted to run programs from the book "The Little Schemer", which
among other things is a crash course on replacing iterating and mutating of data structures with purely functional recursive solutions.
On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 11:19 AM, Owen Densmore
<[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium
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In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels
That's great to hear, too much is NOT fun in programming!
OK, so in the JavaScript world, how does one inch forward toward functional? I don't want to be so functional as some of the extremes. Curring all the way to one arg functions? The article says performance may be an issue. The chief appeal for me is the Self-like objects only, no classes. But the lack of centrality may just as hard to navigate as the over-tight, stateful class approach. -- Owen On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 10:30 AM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium
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Owen writes:
"OK, so in the JavaScript world, how does one inch forward toward functional? I don't want to be so functional as some of the extremes. Curring all the way to one arg functions?"
I'm not sure what properties of JavaScript you care about. If it is just the operational part of being able to run in a web browser, there are languages like Fay (a subset of Haskell) that compile to JavaScript.
FP is something you can do in incremental ways in many languages. Even though I use a mostly-FP style in R (or Common Lisp or Python or Julia or Fortran 2008), in my mind it is isn't _really_ FP unless there is strong typing and an mandatory requirement
of purity. Currying, IMO, is something that is easier to use with languages that have strong typing and type inference because the transformations between function signatures is natural to inspect in those environments. (It is quite common in Haskell to
get complex, even surprising types by automatic type inference.) Currying is nice, in contrast to closures, because it is deliberate and localized; one can capture a lot in lexical scope and a lambda may not be easy to convert into a non-anonymous function
-- you may not be clear on what you are capturing in the closure and why. Also currying has a nice intuition of progressively reducing the degrees of freedom of a function as that information becomes available.
The philosophy of languages like Haskell, F#, Mercury, etc. is to make working code more likely just by virtue of getting it past the compiler. Instead of dynamic typing, the compiler uses logical inference to figure out what types make sense when they are not provided. This gives the similar brevity as dynamic typing but with many more internal consistency checks.
I write a lot of R, and for simple things dynamic typing is fine. But, as soon as I start using it for more complex things in a production context, any minor mistake can cost a lot of wasted CPU time. For me, there's a point at which I want the cognitive
support that static typing affords. And of course static typing gives code generation more information to work with, which usually leads to faster code.
Haskell (GHCI) still has a REPL interpreter-like interface, so it is not fair to say that experimentation is not possible as it is in JavaScript.
Marcus From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Owen Densmore <[hidden email]>
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2017 9:42:15 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Cc: Wedtech Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium
That's great to hear, too much is NOT fun in programming!
OK, so in the JavaScript world, how does one inch forward toward functional? I don't want to be so functional as some of the extremes. Curring all the way to one arg functions?
The article says performance may be an issue.
The chief appeal for me is the Self-like objects only, no classes. But the lack of centrality may just as hard to navigate as the over-tight, stateful class approach.
-- Owen
On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 10:30 AM, Marcus Daniels
<[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium
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Great info, thanks. A few constraints: - I've finally gotten back to Write & Run JavaScript, no transpiling. - My workflow also is simplified: only npm scripts possibly using a node script. - I run a local hot-loading node http server so Write & Run is automatic. All managed by a npm script. Why? The JS world went nuts for several years with transpiling, babel (for es6/future JS features), task managers, linters etc. It was arguably necessary for the times. I used CoffeeScript for a while mainly for safety and pythonic syntax. But my peers said "Oh, great, *another* thing to learn"! And they didn't. :) Things are now hugely better, with editors that are very IDE-ish and eslint built in, and the language is finally getting functional features like map, reduce, and so on. The for loop? It's dead Jim. Yay. So there is a return to sanity and a healing from JS "fatigue". Simple JS, no task managers, and simple commands for minifying, linting, conversion to node modules, and so on. Write & Run w/ chores as scripts. Within that world, currently, is a very strong movement toward FP. Hence the article starting this conversation. And my hope for incrementally converting to FP. -- Owen PS: My work is not very webby. Mainly a NetLogo lookalike for JS. No install, just start up a page. I render using webgl which oddly enough has a fairly nice language for the GPU, and Three.js eases much of the verbosity of the CPU side. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: Classes, Complexity, and Functional Programming – Kent C. Dodds – Medium
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A while ago, I wrote up a few examples of functional and reactive (actor-based) techniques using JavaScript. Perhaps they will add something to this discussion. On Sat, Aug 12, 2017 at 11:20 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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