Lambda the Ultimate

So true. What saves it for me is the appeal of tail recursion...

Programmers like to ask what these functional languages, generally what these restrictive languages, gain you. They are quick and right to point out what you lose up front: freedom to dynamically dispatch on types, freedom to insert effects everywhere, freedom to modify memory all ways, freedom to perform list operations on booleans, freedom to modify the program itself on the fly...

For those restrictions, I gain ease of reasoning, in fact some reasoning becomes trivial. With type-case gone, I gain parametricity. With effects and mutations restricted, I gain more repeatable, predictable results. With type-cavalierism (to perform list operations on booleans, opposite of type-safety) gone, I gain integrity of memory content at the low level and a tidy mental model at the high level. With self-modifying code gone—who misses it anyway?—I gain sanity.

... dysfunctional programming.

He however did hit a pet peeve of mine, which is the common shibboleth that functional programming favors recursion (particularly tail recursion) over looping. As an industry programmer using functional languages daily, I probably write a recursive function definition approximately once per year. Maybe 20% of those uses would be tail-recursive. FWIW, that's also about as often as I use explicit looping (solely for performance reasons). I consider all of those to be code smells, signs that my design is lacking in some regard. What I use instead of looping and recursion is, of course, higher order combinators over my data structures: map, flatmap/bind, filter, fold, exists, groupBy, etc. Those may be recursively implemented (but probably aren't, for performance reasons), but why should I care? Programming via higher-order combinators like that allows me to put out code that is almost branch-less, and thus ludicrously easy to test and debug. Recursion? It's notably unusual for me to even use "if" statements anymore!

The "functional programming combines the flexibility and power of abstract mathematics with the intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics" was funny. Does anyone have a similar one liner about OO or Structured paradigms?