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Wednesday, October 27, 2010

That "Lambda Calculus" thingy again, please!

I came across this presentaion on InfoQ last week and tried to listen to the speaker talking about Functional-Languages-101
No doubt, the speaker is qualified, but after 5mins, she starts to mentioning the term "lambda-calculus" thingy. The presentation starts to smell "academic".
The speaker forgot that her presentation slide has a "101" to it.
Therefore, her presentation joined a long list of  unsuccessful FP proponents and evangelists who failed to convince the masses of the power of FP. Sorry. Nice try.
Someone commented on the presentation sums up my thoughts nicely, which I quoted verbatim:
"Without diving into the discussion of imperative and Functional Programming (FP), my biggest concern about FP is not that we as a programmer don’t understand what a FP is all about; but how to write reusable and readable code.

All the experts feeding us the idea how beautiful FP is, never mentioned a single word about code reusability and readability. OO paradigm has been a success not because it was technically superior than Functional paradigm and vice versa, but because you can see the whole software as a blue print just looking at the API, and it is so easy to maintain and read someone else code.

I don’t claim to be an expert of programming paradigms especially FP, but say it for surety that no FP expert can convince you that reading and maintain the FP code is the easiest thing to do.
"

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