Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? – Richard Feldman

What people said

yewenjie · 2021-09 · Strong recommendation

This talk by Richard Feldman is an excellent discussion about why Functional Programming is not the norm - [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

seer · 2020-12 · Strong recommendation

This is indeed a very interesting question! I’ve also asked myself that time and time again, along the path of slowly discovering what this FP thing is all about over the course of my career. It does look wonderful, it does save you a lot of effort in some cases, where “some” is a vast swathes of computational problems. And its so damn elegant. A lot of examples are thrown around were a bunch of lambda calculus can result in 10-20 fold reduction in source code size. So where’s the catch?There has to be something wrong right? Well recently I stumbled upon a clojure conf talk that tried to tackle precisely this question. [VIDEO] The short of it is that its more of a historical inertia and chance than any specific hidden gotcha. Fascinating talk.

Read the original HN comment ↗

agentultra · 2025-11 · Recommendation

Why isn't it more popular? I think Richard Feldman [0] proposed some of the most reasonable theories as to why functional programming isn't the norm. Your language needs to be the platform-exclusive language for a widely used platform, have a killer application for a highly desired application domain, or be backed by a monster war-chest of marketing money to sway opinions. Since Feldman's talk, Python has grown much faster in popularity in the sense of wide use in the market place... but mostly because it's the scripting language of choice for PyTorch and AI-adjacent libraries/tooling/frameworks which is... a killer application. I like OCaml. I started evaluating functional programming in it by taking the INRIA course online. I spent the last four and half years working in Haskell. I've built some side projects in Zig. I was a CL stan for many years. I asked this question a lot. We often say, "use the best tool for the job." Often that means, "use the tool that's available." I think languages like OCaml, Rust, Haskell etc can be "popular," but in the sense that people like to talk about them and want to learn them and be able to use them (at least, as trends come and go). It's different from "popular" as in, "widely adopted." [0] [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗