[AnalyticLunatic]

Lol, I got Javascript. Not my favorite, but I have been doing a lot of review for it using Codecademy.

[modi123_1]

No need to dredge up a two year old topic or chase said yahoo's post with another.

[AnalyticLunatic]

modi123_1, on 11 January 2013 - 05:12 PM, said:

No need to dredge up a two year old topic or chase said yahoo's post with another.

Woops! My bad modi. I just saw the most recent post flag in the Today's Topics area so assumed it was somewhat new.

[xclite]

ccdan, on 11 January 2013 - 07:18 AM, said:

Haskell and Clojure? I think it's bad idea to even list them in your resume, if you apply for an OOP-language position... FP advocates are notoriously bad at OOP and good programming practices... on the other hand if you rely only on FP languages for a job, you'll be unemployed for a very loooong time... possibly forever!

Factually untrue.

Yay necroposting.

This post has been edited by xclite: 11 January 2013 - 12:52 PM

[darek9576]

I agree. With Scala and Clojure and the need for a better way of multithreading there are more and more FP jobs.

[ccdan]

xclite, on 11 January 2013 - 12:51 PM, said:

Factually untrue.

darek9576, on 11 January 2013 - 01:23 PM, said:

I agree. With Scala and Clojure and the need for a better way of multithreading there are more and more FP jobs.

Verifiably true:
Haskell:
http://www.indeed.co...bs?q=haskell&l= (LOL! Haskell, TX; The Haskell Company, etc.)
Clojure:
Jobs 1 to 10 of 251 (it's usually listed together
with java and many other langauges)
http://www.indeed.co...bs?q=clojure&l=
Java:
Jobs 1 to 10 of 66,294
http://www.indeed.co.../jobs?q=java&l=
C++:
Jobs 1 to 10 of 31,950
http://www.indeed.co...bs?q=c%2B%2B&l=

This post has been edited by ccdan: 11 January 2013 - 03:18 PM

[xclite]

I take less issue with your claims on employment and more on:

Quote

FP advocates are notoriously bad at OOP and good programming practices...

Proof?

In fact I would go a step further and claim that limiting side effects, a major goal of FP proponents, is a fantastic programming practice.

Further, if it were something that were going to grow in the future (not that I'm making such a claim), showing CURRENT postings does nothing to disprove that. I bet there was a time when Java job postings were quite limited.

This post has been edited by xclite: 11 January 2013 - 04:04 PM

[Lemur]

Seriously with the popularity equals superiority again? It didn't work for PHP, RPG, or Java.

How about we look at the average pay of a talented FP, especially a LISP AI engineer, and tell me again how popularity is a good thing. High level LISP and FP engineers trump the dime a dozen types. Why? Because it's danged hard to learn correctly.

[Sergio Tapia]

The question at hand wasn't which get's paid more, or which has more prestige. Factually there are less jobs for functional languages. That's a fact.

[farrell2k]

The best language is the one that makes you money. Forget the technical specifics of a language. As for which one to study, do a job search in your area to get an idea of which are the most popular, then pick one of those.

I feel old posting in such an old thread.

This post has been edited by farrell2k: 12 January 2013 - 04:25 PM

[ccdan]

xclite, on 11 January 2013 - 04:03 PM, said:

I take less issue with your claims on employment and more on:

Quote

FP advocates are notoriously bad at OOP and good programming practices...

Proof?

The "proof" is scattered all over the web, on blogs, forums and so on... most FP advocates have a bunch of utterly bad ideas:
- "changing state is bad" - well, sorry, but computers are all about changing state... without changing state we can't do anything useful - their attempts to limit state change only result in crappy stuff, from highly inefficient code that uses tons of resources for trivial thing to stuff that doesn't work at all
- "dynamic/inferred typing is good" - it's actually pretty bad, it leads to lots of bugs
- "elegant, concise, terse, expressive code is good" - this is one of the most stupid arguments FP advocates often bring, without realizing that they're talking about extremely cryptic code in most cases (which is a very, very, very bad thing in real world software engineering), besides being a very subjective matter (as to what "elegant" means) ...
- "commenting as little as possible is good" - this is more ore less related to their ideas about "elegant code" , "we spend out time thinking, not coding" etc. - awful, really awful stuff!

xclite, on 11 January 2013 - 04:03 PM, said:

In fact I would go a step further and claim that limiting side effects, a major goal of FP proponents, is a fantastic programming practice.

This often brought argument, when it comes to functional languages, is both misleading and illusory.
It's misleading because FP advocates present functional languages as if imperative/oop languages can't achieve the same thing. The same thing can be achieved in almost any OOP language, using constants, recursion and the like. Except it's awful idea, that leads to extremely inefficient code. But at least compared to functional languages, the code is a lot clearer.

It's illusory because complete lack of state change simply cannot be achieved. There's always some "way out" that's absolutely necessary to use if you want to make anything useful.
The goal of "limiting" state change is also pretty much illusory.
Computers, in the vast majority of cases, aren't used for theorem proving or some other math crap. They're interactive, dynamic machines, that do all kinds of things all the time and this always involves some state change, anything from changing settings to displaying things on the screen to database updates. It's all about changing state.

xclite, on 11 January 2013 - 04:03 PM, said:

Further, if it were something that were going to grow in the future (not that I'm making such a claim), showing CURRENT postings does nothing to disprove that. I bet there was a time when Java job postings were quite limited.

Java became very popular almost instantly. Functional languages have been around for a few decades. Multicore processors have been around for more than a decade. Multi-processor machines have been around for about half a century.
No one cares and no one uses functional languages (other than a fringe minority)
They're mostly appealing to mathematicians who can't grasp OOP (and I noticed that many math people do have trouble getting OOP, although I don't know why)

Lemur, on 11 January 2013 - 05:05 PM, said:

Seriously with the popularity equals superiority again? It didn't work for PHP, RPG, or Java.

Java? You have to be kidding.

Lemur, on 11 January 2013 - 05:05 PM, said:

How about we look at the average pay of a talented FP, especially a LISP AI engineer, and tell me again how popularity is a good thing. High level LISP and FP engineers trump the dime a dozen types. Why? Because it's danged hard to learn correctly.

How about we look at the average pay of a talented Java senior programmer, or Java enterprise architect?
LISP AI engineer? Who the heck uses LISP? PHP, with its usually low pay, is a far better bet because at least you can find jobs. But there are exceptions here and there, and there are better chances that you'll find well paid PHP jobs, than LISP ones. You can even set up your company and sell software/software services to others using platforms like PHP, Java, .Net, C++/Qt/etc. But pretty much no one wants LISP as a platform. Or Haskell. Or OCaml.

[xclite]

ccdan, on 19 January 2013 - 08:26 AM, said:

xclite, on 11 January 2013 - 04:03 PM, said:

I take less issue with your claims on employment and more on:

Quote

FP advocates are notoriously bad at OOP and good programming practices...

Proof?

The "proof" is scattered all over the web, on blogs, forums and so on... most FP advocates have a bunch of utterly bad ideas:

This alone shows that you don't actually have a real basis for this statement beyond your own unshakable prejudice - if I were to take the practices advocated by say... many procedural and OO programmers, I could DEFINITELY paint a bad picture of their abilities. Look at some of the ideas persisted on this very forum!

Quote

- "changing state is bad" - well, sorry, but computers are all about changing state... without changing state we can't do anything useful - their attempts to limit state change only result in crappy stuff, from highly inefficient code that uses tons of resources for trivial thing to stuff that doesn't work at all

AGREED. The point is to avoid unneccesary state and side effects, not ban state altogether. Modern functional languages like Clojure make it easy to have state when you need it.

Quote

- "dynamic/inferred typing is good" - it's actually pretty bad, it leads to lots of bugs

I agree that dynamic typing leads to bugs. I disagree that inferred typing causes nearly the problems, but since you don't have a source, I don't need to provide one either. Dynamic typing isn't necessary in functional languages - this is a problem you have with the type system, not the paradigm.

Quote

- "elegant, concise, terse, expressive code is good" - this is one of the most stupid arguments FP advocates often bring, without realizing that they're talking about extremely cryptic code in most cases (which is a very, very, very bad thing in real world software engineering), besides being a very subjective matter (as to what "elegant" means) ...

Concise, terse, expressive code IS good and there is no sane argument to be made that having to type more words to get the same thing done is better. It also makes it easier to hold a problem in your head. Yes cryptic code is bad, no that's not a "feature" of functional languages, that's a feature of coding style (perl?).

Quote

- "commenting as little as possible is good" - this is more ore less related to their ideas about "elegant code" , "we spend out time thinking, not coding" etc. - awful, really awful stuff!

Nobody believes commenting as little as possible is good. HAVING to comment less is nice, but more correct comments are always good for the next programmer. Is this something people are actually saying or are you just trying to infer things to further your agenda?
"We spend our time thinking, not coding" is DEFINITELY good. Are you seriously advocating such a mindless work flow that you dive in and start typing and eventually have a mess that works? I would hope that regardless of paradigm, you spend more time thinking about what you're doing than actually typing lines of code.

Quote

xclite, on 11 January 2013 - 04:03 PM, said:

In fact I would go a step further and claim that limiting side effects, a major goal of FP proponents, is a fantastic programming practice.

This often brought argument, when it comes to functional languages, is both misleading and illusory.
It's misleading because FP advocates present functional languages as if imperative/oop languages can't achieve the same thing. The same thing can be achieved in almost any OOP language, using constants, recursion and the like. Except it's awful idea, that leads to extremely inefficient code. But at least compared to functional languages, the code is a lot clearer.

There's a lot wrong with this paragraph, but at this point it's becoming apparent that you actually don't know anything about functional programming or language design to begin with.

• Limiting state can be done in other languages, but it can difficult(depending on language) because the paradigms ENCOURAGE using state. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea - I often find that doing so in Ruby and Java makes my code clearer and easier to debug. Use objects where they're suited, limit state where it makes no sense to have it. Something about the "right tool for the job"?
  
• The code is clearer because SURPRISE YOU CAN READ IT BECAUSE IT'S WHAT YOU'RE USED TO
  
• There's nothing inefficient about limiting state. Where do you get these crazy ideas?
  
• You don't need recursion to limit side effects. Yes recursion CAN be opaque and inefficient. You have to know more than just some theory to write good code, and that's true in any paradigm. Don't be a jackwagon (not you specially, just as a programmer).

Quote

It's illusory because complete lack of state change simply cannot be achieved. There's always some "way out" that's absolutely necessary to use if you want to make anything useful.

The goal of "limiting" state change is also pretty much illusory.
Computers, in the vast majority of cases, aren't used for theorem proving or some other math crap. They're interactive, dynamic machines, that do all kinds of things all the time and this always involves some state change, anything from changing settings to displaying things on the screen to database updates. It's all about changing state.

I agree, it's pretty much impossible to have a useful program without state. It's also impossible to survive without eating, but that does not mean reducing my intake of food is bad for my health.

Quote

xclite, on 11 January 2013 - 04:03 PM, said:

Further, if it were something that were going to grow in the future (not that I'm making such a claim), showing CURRENT postings does nothing to disprove that. I bet there was a time when Java job postings were quite limited.

Java became very popular almost instantly. Functional languages have been around for a few decades. Multicore processors have been around for more than a decade. Multi-processor machines have been around for about half a century.
No one cares and no one uses functional languages (other than a fringe minority)
They're mostly appealing to mathematicians who can't grasp OOP (and I noticed that many math people do have trouble getting OOP, although I don't know why)

I don't actually claim that functional languages are going to solve the multicore thing, so I don't really have much to say on this. Just noting that a language could come out tomorrow that has Java's popularity and is SURPRISE functional. Remember how there were OO languages before Java?

Quote

Lemur, on 11 January 2013 - 05:05 PM, said:

Seriously with the popularity equals superiority again? It didn't work for PHP, RPG, or Java.

Java? You have to be kidding.

How is he kidding? Java is popular, it certainly isn't awesome. The value of superior is subjective, of course, since Java clearly is used to build a lot of things at a lot of companies.

Quote

Lemur, on 11 January 2013 - 05:05 PM, said:

How about we look at the average pay of a talented FP, especially a LISP AI engineer, and tell me again how popularity is a good thing. High level LISP and FP engineers trump the dime a dozen types. Why? Because it's danged hard to learn correctly.

How about we look at the average pay of a talented Java senior programmer, or Java enterprise architect?
LISP AI engineer? Who the heck uses LISP? PHP, with its usually low pay, is a far better bet because at least you can find jobs. But there are exceptions here and there, and there are better chances that you'll find well paid PHP jobs, than LISP ones. You can even set up your company and sell software/software services to others using platforms like PHP, Java, .Net, C++/Qt/etc. But pretty much no one wants LISP as a platform. Or Haskell. Or OCaml.

Yeah I cringed when I read that. Whatever my thoughts on functional languages, getting paid to do LISP AI is a pretty niche and "not-gonna-happen" counter-example.
However, you're entirely wrong about OCaml. It's used quite often in the financial industry, with some salaries that are RIDICULOUS. Additionally, Erlang, while not entirely functional (and does provide reasonable handling of side effects) is VERY popular.

This post has been edited by xclite: 19 January 2013 - 08:23 AM

[macosxnerd101]

Quote

They're mostly appealing to mathematicians who can't grasp OOP (and I noticed that many math people do have trouble getting OOP, although I don't know why)

This is just a dumb argument. I'm a math major. Any mathematician I've met that can program has generally been doing such for a while and doesn't have a problem with OO languages. Those that lack the aptitude to program generally don't. What I have seen more on the math end of the spectrum than the CS end is that mathematicians can be less concerned with proper design. When doing mathematical computing, it's about mathematical computing, not so much writing clean code for others to read later on. That's what the research paper is for.

[Lemur]

Your ignorance is showing...

LISP AI is actually very frequently used in Data Mining and analysis for high level decision making and pattern recognition. This is the type of stuff LISP and R thrive on. Well what is that even good for you may ask. Advertisements, marketing, and business. R itself was inspired by Scheme which is a LISP dialect. It's used, and very often, in extremely high level markets. Tell me right now that pattern recognition and statistics aren't commonly used and are only niche markets...

I know OO just fine, and inferring that is quite frankly insulting. Java was not an instant hit, nothing is. Do your homework before making outlandish statements like that. I am not a mathematician. I hated math for the longest time, and I've since taught myself from scratch. I have no problem comprehending OO, but there's a time and a place for it.

The argument on state is nonsensical. Again, it's an argument of a time and place. Avoiding it is ideal in the case of functions, where it should not be a black box effect. It should have a purity that allows for functions to be executed without risk for side effects. If you've actually written professional software you'd well past know how amazing that is.

I'll chalk this up to a newbie with no real world experience lipping off for the sake of superiority. Do your homework and research before you dare bother to reply again, I won't waste my time on garbage replies like that again. It's insulting how little effort in research you put into that.

[macosxnerd101]

I came across Functionaljobs.com. There are FP jobs out there and they're growing. I figured I'd share the link for everyone to discuss.