Pensieri di un lunatico minore

The grinding of functional axes

It started simply enough, with a growing discussion of alternative languages—fueled, I believe, by the rise and acceptance of so-called scripting languages—but the near deafening shrill chorus of functional programming people who have taken a good idea and driven it to absurdity is getting to me. The latest mindless addition to the cacaphony is this comment on Cees’ great post on Java productivity:

Non-final classes are the mistake, but then, so is Smalltalk.
Ever tried a functional language?

It’s as though the Marquis de Sade has come to life and taken over the Internet discourse about programming. It dominates, disproportionately, the links on reddit, and while I’m an enormous fan of Lisp, it’s not so much the Lisp people as those who worship at the temple of Haskell who are driving me batty.

I knew the world was going more and more absurd when I watched a very intelligent security researcher at one of the big R&D organizations spend days writing something in Haskell that could have been done by hand in an hour or two. This is not an indictment of Haskell, so much as this religious fervor that fuels the insanity.

No tool solves every problem. Put down the damned hammer and pick up a screw-driver once in a while.