So... I just remembered a story that's perfect for devrant.

My brother got into engineering in university, and during the second semester they had their introductory class to programming. They had weekly homeworks that the lecturer would check and give grades accordingly.

The factors that could influence the grading were: execution (meaning that the code would excecute as intended), efficiency and readabilty. The weeks passed and everyone was doing well, getting fairly good grades. Everyone was happy.

Until one day a random guy we'll call bob got the worst grade possible. Bob wasn't a bad student. He had over-the-average grades in all the weekly homeworks and even impressed the professor in some. Naturally, he was baffled when he saw his grade on the google spreadsheet. He was pretty sure his code ran well. He always tested it on different machines and OSs. So, at the end of the class, he went straight to the helper of the class, in a pretty imperative manner, to demand to know how the fuck he got that grade. It's impossible he got excecution, efficiency and readabilty, wrong. All three wrong? Impossible. Even the stupidiest kid in the class had some points on readabilty.

"Oh, so you are Bob. Huh?" said the helper in a laid-back attitude. "Come with me. Prof. X is waiting for you in his office."

This got Bob even more confused. As they approached the office, the courage he had in a first moment banished and gave way for nervousness and fear.

The helper nocks the door. "Prof., Bobs here"

As soon as Bob sits in the chair in front of Prof. X's, he knew something bad was coming.
"In all these years of teaching..." said Prof. X hesitantly. "In all these years of teaching I have not come even close to see something similar to what you've done. You should be ashamed of yourself." Needless to say, Bob was panicked.

"In all these years I have not seen such blatant mockery!" added the professor. "HOW THE FUCK DID YOU EVEN DARE TO SEND A HOMEWORK WITH SUCH VARIABLE NAMING" That's when Bob realised the huge mistake he made. "NEVER IN ALL THESE YEARS I HAVE SEEN SOMEONE NAME HIS VARIABLES *opens the file on his desktop *: PENIS, SHIT, FUCKSHIT, GAYFUCKING<insert Prof. X's name>MAN, GOATSE, VAGINAVAR, CUMFUNCTION, [...]" The list of obcenities went on and on. In each word, the professor hit the table harder than the last time.

Turns out Bob felt so in comfort with the ease of the course he decided to spice things up by using "funny naming conventions" while coding, and then tidying everything up before uploading the homework. This week he forgot, and fucked it big time.

So remember folks, always check your code before committing/giving it in/production. And always adhere to naming conventions.

Imagine if a structural engineer whose bridge has collapsed and killed several people calls it a feature.

Imagine if that structural engineer made a mistake in the tensile strength of this or that type of bolt and shoved it under the rug as "won't fix".

Imagine that it's you who's relying on that bridge to commute every day. Would you use it, knowing that its QA might not have been very rigorous and could fail at any point in time?

Seriously, you developers have all kinds of fancy stuff like Continuous Integration, Agile development, pipelines, unit testing and some more buzzwords. So why is it that the bridges don't collapse, yet new critical security vulnerabilities caused by bad design, unfixed bugs etc appear every day?

Your actions have consequences. Maybe not for yourself but likely it will have on someone else who's relying on your software. And good QA instead of that whole stupid "move fast and break things" is imperative.

Software developers call themselves the same engineers as the structural engineer and the electrical engineer whose mistakes can kill people. I can't help but be utterly disappointed with the status quo in software development. Don't you carry the title of the engineer with pride? The pride that comes from the responsibility that your application creates?

I wish I'd taken the blue pill. I didn't want to know that software "engineering" was this bad, this insanity-inducing.

But more than anything, it surprises me that the world that relies so much on software hasn't collapsed in some incredible way yet, despite the quality of what's driving it.

Just before you, my fellow system programmer, scroll past this, let me say this:

🍬 The web is actiually simple. 🍬

Both HTML and CSS is declarative. It's all easy when you understand the concepts, learn how to be idiomatic and quit trying to do that imperative bullshit in languages that aren't imperative.

HTML is simple. You know the boilerplate: doctype, head, body, that's all. Just mark it up and do NOT look at it before you end, mark it up as it were article or something. The appearance is up to css.

CSS is simple. You may even forget bem or rscss, you're already a skilled software developer. Use common sense and your code-splitting and naming skills you gained reading The Code Complete or doing software development for years.

Forget mockups. Forget absolute positioning, forget setting width and height in pixels. Go to awwwards, find some inspiration. Draw some buttons and fields on paper with your good old pencil. Then go and write some css. Feel free to steal some shadows and transitions from codepen.

Read about 8-pixel grid system. Let every element push away from others by setting something like margin: 16px; and whoops! You've just got fully responsive and got great vertical rhythm without even using media queries!

Oh my god, do NEVER set width and height explicitly! Type something like button { width: 120px; } and bang! The entire web page is broken. Quit that shit. Let it resize as it should. It will resize itself to fit its contents.

HTML is by default ready for your template engine. That's how you receive data from server — as server-side rendered, plain old HTML page. On the other hand, the form element is the most axiomatic and simple way to send the data to server. That's how you send it — as plain old GET or POST that every webserver can handle.

All of there are true:
1. It's easy to get great 100% responsiveness without media queries.
2. It's easy to align items in row, it's just one line of css. Maybe two, if you still want elements to wrap, but want to use flexbox:
.parent {
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
}
3. HTML and CSS are fast by default.
4. You don't need mockups to achieve great visual experience. Mockups is imperative, web is declarative.
5. You may not even need JavaScript to make great website.

Go on, ask me a question about web! I'll ready to answer everything.

Let the student use their own laptops. Even buy them one instead of having computers on site that no one uses for coding but only for some multiple choice tests and to browse Facebook.

Teach them 10 finger typing. (Don't be too strict and allow for personal preferences.)

Teach them text navigation and editing shortcuts. They should be able to scroll per page, jump to the beginning or end of the line or jump word by word. (I am not talking vi bindings or emacs magic.) And no, key repeat is an antifeature.

Teach them VCS before their first group assignment. Let's be honest, VCS means git nowadays. Yet teach them git != GitHub.

Teach git through the command line. They are allowed to use a gui once they aren't afraid to resolve a merge conflict or to rebase their feature branch against master. Just committing and pushing is not enough.

Teach them test-driven development ASAP. You can even give them assignments with a codebase of failing tests and their job is to make them pass in the beginning. Later require them to write tests themselves.

Don't teach the language, teach concepts. (No, if else and for loops aren't concepts you god-damn amateur! That's just syntax!)

When teaching object oriented programming, I'd smack you if do inane examples with vehicles, cars, bikes and a Mercedes Benz. Or animal, cat and dog for that matter. (I came from a self-taught imperative background. Those examples obfuscate more than they help.) Also, inheritance is overrated in oop teachings.

Functional programming concepts should be taught earlier as its concepts of avoiding side effects and pure functions can benefit even oop code bases. (Also great way to introduce testing, as pure functions take certain inputs and produce one output.)

Focus on one language in the beginning, it need not be Java, but don't confuse students with Java, Python and Ruby in their first year. (Bonus point if the language supports both oop and functional programming.)

And for the love of gawd: let them have a strictly typed language. Why would you teach with JavaScript!?

Use industry standards. Notepad, atom and eclipse might be open source and free; yet JetBrains community editions still best them.

For grades, don't your dare demand for them to write code on paper. (Pseudocode is fine.)

Don't let your students play compiler in their heads. It's not their job to know exactly what exception will be thrown by your contrived example. That's the compilers job to complain about. Rather teach them how to find solutions to these errors.

Teach them advanced google searches.

Teach them how to write a issue for a library on GitHub and similar sites.

Teach them how to ask a good stackoverflow question :>

So this post is going to target an irritating aspect of a specific culture based on observational evidence over the last 20 years, and has reared its hideous face yet again. If you're triggered by that, stop reading here.

I'm flatly fed up with two-faced onshore Desi coworkers. They make up 95% of my colleagues and the following sequence of events has played out repeatedly over the course of my career, consistently, though it's slightly more pronounced in other women for whatever reason :

1. Work with them for years, good relationship, teach them all sorts of skills (which I will do freely for anyone, for any reasons as I view it to be a moral imperative), general lifting up and solid teamwork.
2. They move up in the hierarchy, generally to management, usually project
3. The second they view themselves as higher in the pecking order they start treating me like shit as if we have no history. Rude, commanding, unwilling to share details, obligatory exasperated thank yous if any at all, not interested in anything I have to say even if I'm the noted expert on the subject.

I understand a lot of their etiquette culture, specifically the level of "directness" or politeness they employ is based on the estimated risk of loss in the interaction. I find that disgusting, but I understand that academically. I just can't get my mind around how universal this shiftiness is, as it happens over and over again. It's like human decency and respect go out the window the second they don't feel like they have anything to gain from you. In *my* culture that is the lowest form of behavior a human can exhibit, and it causes me to rage because I can't imagine being so utterly devoid of altruism.

Fuck. It's just so sickening. It's fucking debased, and selfish and greedy and fuck. I can't even, this is one of those things that so irrational my mind can't accept it and I just go around and around on it.

Tl;dr you want to get throat punched? Because that's how you get throat punched. It's definitely getting this person doxxed to USCIS

I started at a company to develop an "uber" clone. Hired by the company's cto. I was happy initially as i had been unemployed for a while but that's because i didn't see the shitstorm coming. The task was build this using php, well 2 weeks later and db locking issues because mysql only allows 100 connections and the website takes over 200mb per request, i tried using the meteor framework, a lil better but the orphaned process would require me to reboot every 2 days. So enter erlang, built in 3 weeks works amazing problems none here... Well in comes the cto (which came in once a week). Apparently he had been reviewing my code and didn't understand it. He couldn't understand no for loops etc and demanded that it be made understandable to a normal dev. Did normal devs write uber no. Anyhow i spent the next 6 Weeks refactoring trying to make elixir looks like imperative programming, he finally gave up, so now I'm deep committed writing an API, finish in a week cto comes in and "why aren't you using patch" i don't need it, well another day implanting a patch api that will never be used. Ok done. Now we have a meeting with the investors who i worked in the same building with and they want a frontend built. I explained i was a backend dev and they needed a uiux expert. Next week cto comes back with this jquery fire pit and stolen bootstrap theme and take me with implementing it. This time we scrap the api change some of the backend logic and implement rest from the 90s one static page per request. After 3 months working with jquery I'm let go because of finical issues. I told them i was a backend dev but they didn't listen if the cto would've gotten a frontend expert things would be different but what to expect from a cto who's coding legacy is creating WordPress plugins.

Hopefully things will be better soon I'm tired of living on the streets.

the more time I spend in this industry, the more I come to realize that it's a very blurry line between PROGRAMMING and CONFIGURING.

How much programming do you do these days, really? Isn't it just configuring your frameworks and libraries and engines to do what they do in the way you want?

Does it still make you programmers...?

And then what are these .conf files for your application? A declarative configuration for your... imperative configuration...?

I'm not sure *why*, but I increasingly see the following pattern:

Challenge a primarily OO / imperative dev by saying OO or imperative styles aren't always a good fit, and that a stateless functional approach can offer advantages, and you often get something akin to:

"Yeah, it's new to me so I'm still working my way around it, but I get that. Makes a lot of sense."

Challenge a functional dev by saying the functional style isn't always best, and in some cases functional isn't a good fit, and you tend to get:

"YOU IMBECILE! YOU ARE SIMPLY CONSTRAINED BY YOUR YEARS OF MINDLESSLY FOLLOWING THE OO HERD! FUNCTIONAL IS ALWAYS SUPERIOR!! ALWAYS, I TELL YOU!!"

I mean geez guys, calm down and learn it's just another tool in the toolbox. I get that popular paradigms emerge and have their die-hard supporters, but I didn't even see this kind of thing when OO became the "new thing everyone needs to use for everything" in the 90's.

Designer reporting a UI/Design related bug:

I noticed the wrong colour is being used on screen X. It should be xxxxx. Its imperative that we fix this, as it destroys the entire design motif. Our colour scheme draws influence from the ancient Mayans. They were relentless in their pursuit of excellence, whether it be their temples, their sophisticated writing system, their complex calendars, or their advanced mathematics.They sought immortality through their work, as do we with ours. Users will become lost in our onboarding unless we harmonise the flow, the slightest deviation could be catastrophic. Please fix this as priority 1, to avoid running the balance of the app

Designer reporting a technical bug:

Oh yeah, app crashed last week. Not sure what I was doing, maybe look into that

Should you use declarative or imperative paradigm? :D #programmingParadigms

My imperative dumb ass me trying to code in ocaml:
👁👄👁

Imperative programming: why do you have to make our lives so difficult?

I hate Sass.

When installing all NPM dependencies with npm i, it's always quick, but not with sass. Ooooh myy goood. It starts compiling. It always misses something. Your node version is always not what sass needs. It pulls out gyp which requires some native shit. The build is never reproducible, it always fails with some horrible two mile long poorly-formatted stacktrace that is just gibberish.

More than that, sass is just poorly designed tool used by frontend fuckboys to write imperative, nonstandard, non-maintainable styles. If you know shit about css, you don't need sass.

I'm so happy it's going to die along with gulp. Webpack and css modules are here.

Yes, css-in-js that has a runtime penalty is also shit. If you like its syntax but dislike everything else, use Linaria. It has no runtime penalty and looks just like other css-in-js solutions.

Why is it that virtually all new languages in the last 25 years or so have a C-like syntax?

- Java wanted to sort-of knock off C++.
- C# wanted to be Java but on Microsoft's proprietary stack instead of SUN's (now Oracle's).
- Several other languages such as Vala, Scala, Swift, etc. do only careful evolution, seemingly so as to not alienate the devs used to previous C-like languages.
- Not to speak of everyone's favourite enemy, JavaScript…
- Then there is ReasonML which is basically an alternate, more C-like, syntax for OCaml, and is then compiled to JavaScript.

Now we're slowly arriving at the meat of this rant: back when I started university, the first semester programming lecture used Scheme, and provided a fine introduction to (functional) programming. Scheme, like other variants of Lisp, is a fine language, very flexible, code is data, data is code, but you get somewhat lost in a sea of parentheses, probably worse than the C-like languages' salad of curly braces. But it was a refreshing change from the likes of C, C++, and Java in terms of approach.

But the real enlightenment came when I read through Okasaki's paper on purely functional data structures. The author uses Standard ML in the paper, and after the initial shock (because it's different than most everything else I had seen), and getting used to the notation, I loved the crisp clarity it brings with almost no ceremony at all!

After looking around a bit, I found that nobody seems to use SML anymore, but there are viable alternatives, depending on your taste:

- Pragmatic programmers can use OCaml, which has immutability by default, and tries to guide the programmer to a functional programming mindset, but can accommodate imperative constructs easily when necessary.
- F# was born as OCaml on .NET but has now evolved into its own great thing with many upsides and very few downsides; I recommend every C# developer should give it a try.
- Somewhat more extreme is Haskell, with its ideology of pure functions and lazy evaluation that makes introducing side effects, I/O, and other imperative constructs rather a pain in the arse, and not quite my piece of cake, but learning it can still help you be a better programmer in whatever language you use on a day-to-day basis.

Anyway, the point is that after working with several of these languages developed out of the original Meta Language, it baffles me how anyone can be happy being a curly-braces-language developer without craving something more succinct and to-the-point. Especially when it comes to JavaScript: all the above mentioned ML-like languages can be compiled to JavaScript, so developing directly in JavaScript should hardly be a necessity.

Obviously these curly-braces languages will still be needed for a long time coming, legacy systems and all—just look at COBOL—, but my point stands.

When are people going to understand that programming is not about quickly putting something together?

Programming may have its utility in helping us out building solutions, but that's a secondary function of it.
Ultimately and abstractly, as MIT professors said, it's about the imperative paradigm of solving problems.

I really dislike it when people treat programming as if it were a toolbox. It is a great engineering feat. That's like saying math is just about numbers. No, it is about concepts. We're thinkers, not doers.

!rant

so the other day i was programming and suddenly i wanted to learn haskell. (i don't know why it hit me so suddenly, maybe because it's a 'pure' functional programming language and these 2 terms i knew nothing about)

and to be honest it's really hard coming from an imperative programming language (C/C++, yes, i know they are different in their ways). it's like learning to program again! you really have to get a different mindset and for me honestly it's hard to grasp the idea that 'variables' are immutable! like, that's soooo weird it still stucks to me. for example how did they define the max or min function without using a while loop? what are monads?

I am just 2 days in but it'll be a fun ride!

For context, I've been working for a couple years now with Rust, and, I have to say, the experience has been astoundingly pleasant. The language is both incredibly productive and meets each of my use cases and stipulations regarding speed, safety, and complexity. That said, I've come to beg the question, "what is the point of functional languages like Haskell?" To me, what seems attractive about Haskell is the inherent thread safety, and the added syntactic niceties of code written in the language. However, one must keep in mind, my experience with Haskell has been pretty limited, simply due to the massive learning curve that the language presents. Such a "learning curve" brings me to my central point: these days with languages like Rust which bring together the best from functional and imperative worlds, it seems like functional languages are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Let's face it: no sane person will choose to learn a functional language as their first language, outside of academia and mathematics, and OOP/OOP-like languages remain dominant in the space. So, why then, is Haskell any different? What benefit do languages like Haskell pose in the modern CS space that thread-safe, non-GC languages don't already provide?

In my experience object oriented is very good for composing high level abstractions into a complete system. Functional is awesome for validation, parsing and massaging data in any way and imperative is tithe most useful paradigm to handle side effect dependent code that either manipulate the computers state ( read/write) or communicate with external systems.

The people acting as if one of them is the one true way are misleading you.

One of biggest epiphanies came through this fundamental critique in SICP of the assignment operator. Through years of imperative programming it seems so innocent, doesn't it? But that you lose referential transparency, run into the alias problem and fundamental difficulty to determine object equality (or of their instances) - that was kind of eye opening considering all the pain I had already experienced with state in concurrency.
(It led me so far to think it's an ontological issue, that even in the discrete computing universe we have not come so much further than Zenon's paradoxa on change.)

Functional programming instead of imperative

If you're subscribed to me only because of my jokes, feel free to ignore this rant. You won't miss anything.

If not, bear with me.

I was wrong about almost everything I can remember. Preaching so-called “conceptual thinking”, I invented a fantasy world of random anecdotes, which turned into a completely false worldview that shaped my reality. I bashed magical thinking, yet succumbed to it. What I believed to be true was just as magical, wrapped into what sounded like science. In the Dunning-Krueger scheme, I was right there on Peak Stupid.

Random hear-say, stupid concepts I invented, random “knowledge” I picked from YouTube videos, all that was rotting inside my head, one anecdote contradicting another. Ultimately, I think this was the reason of my constant anxiety and pointless, never-ending thought process in background.

If you learned anything factual from me and didn't fact-check it, please forget that immediately. The list includes but is not limited to everything on brain structure, everything on philosophy, almost everything on engineering and architecture, almost everything on systems theory and programming meta stuff (declarative, imperative, etc.)

I admit bashing unit tests. The only reason was me disliking writing them in uni. I wrote like three test cases, disliked it, and the rest was history. Everything else was a rationalization on top. If I was right about something, I was just lucky.

I'm not a CSS prodigy. I know stuff that earns me money and impresses my colleagues, but my knowledge is just one step above basics, in one thousand steps ladder.

I started making a library to get to know TypeScript. 4 days into the commits and I don't know if I made the best choice or the worst choice. I MEAN WHY CLASSES!! JAVASCRIPT IS MORE A FUCNTIONAL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE THAN AN IMPERATIVE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE! I DONT WANT TO NEW UP! I DONT WANT THE DEVELOPERS TO NEW UP! WHERE ARE THE DESIGN PATTERNS! I CANT FUCKING FIND IT!!

Object Orientation is not a feature, it is an unneeded layer of complexity over a dying paradigm, Imperative Programming

Ban visual programming programs, like scratch after the fist month introduce them to enhanced Google search strings and let them code on the command line going from imperative, over functional to object oriented programming styles using languages suited for the current style. Not like using Java from the get go. I hated it, waiting until everyone got to the point where they kind of understood the logic but failed at using correct syntax and efficient coding styles.

My apologize to everyone I told that functional programming is declarative.

It's actually imperative. Thank you @AndSoWeCode for figuring that out. I spent the whole day thinking about it.

Lisp is imperative. It's just different way to define the exact data transformations, and that's quite imperative.

On the other hand, HTML, CSS, config files and markup languages are declarative.

But writing the imperative program which is configured with declarative configs seems like great idea. Consider Apache web server and others.

Sharing a first look at a prototype Web Components library I am working on for "fun"

TL;DR left side is pivot (grouped) table, right side is declarative code for it (Everything except the custom formatting is done declaratively, but has the option to be imperative as well).

====

TL;DR (Too long, did read):

I'm challenging myself to be creative with the cool new things that browsers offer us. Lani so far has a focus on extreme extensibility, abstraction from dependencies, and optional declarative style.

It's also going to be a micro CSS framework, but that's taking the back-seat.

I wanted to highlight my design here with this table, and the code that is written to produce this result.

First, you can see that the <lani-table> element is reading template, data, and layout information from its child elements. Besides the custom highlighting code (Yellow background in the "Tags" column, and green gradient in the "Score" column), everything can be done without opening even a single script tag.

The <lani-data-source> element is rather special. It's an abstraction of any data source, and you, as a developer can add custom data sources and hook up the handlers to your whim (the element itself uses the "type" attribute to choose a handler. In this case, the handler is "download" which simply sends a fetch request to the server once and downloads the result to memory).

Templates are stored in an html file, not string literals (Which I think really fucks the code) and loaded async, then cached into an object (so that the network tab doesn't get crowded, even if we can count on the HTTP cache). This also has the benefit of allowing me to parse the HTML templates once and then caching the parsed result in memory, so templates are never re-parsed from string no matter how many custom elements are created.

Everything is "compiled" into a single, minified .js file that you include on your page.

I know it's nothing extraordinary, but for something that doesn't need to be compiled, transpiled, packaged, shipped, and kissed goodnight, I think it's a really nice design and I hope to continue work on it and improve it over time

Do you guys know a cool language to get a bit more into functional programming?
Doesn't matter if purely functional or a mashup of functional and imperative programming.
And please a real-world language, let Haskell stay in its Ivory-tower where it belongs.

Functional-Declarative languages should only be esoteric ones. They are interesting for research and a mathematical toy, but they should not be used for programming languages used in the real world.

I currently try to write OpenSCAD code that places a list of modules, with information given from an array, with varying sizes next to each other. And is so hard and cumbersome. Whoever had the idea to cripple OpenSCAD by not having variables was stupid or sadistic.

The actual CPU run instructions, one after the other, there is no good reason to not allow some imperative elements in a programming language.

GraphQL fans, please read the whole rant until you jump in the comments.

I get it, when you have multiple data sources (that aren't always proper databases), your stuff is relevant.

But most of the people use GraphQL when they have a single database. In that case, native joins are always faster than GraphQL dataloader N + 1 BS you have. It takes less time and less code to go to the backend and write an endpoint for the frontend with a DB query than write several GraphQL ones on the frontend and then combine the data with imperative JS. It will work faster too.

So why the fuck should I use GraphQL at all?

Anyone here using the Nim programming language? I just started today and want to see how others feel about it and if anyone may be interested in collaborating on a project.

C would say to other languages:

"I am imperative
not functional
nor object oriented but
I am faster than you"

I can now appreciate some design decisions behind react-redux after witnessing some angular OOP clusterfuck.

I am sure there is some clean/correct way to code in angular, but everyone is treating angular as java.

Some angular application (the one I have to work with) is littered with network calls. It's difficult to spot duplicates. People usually resolve promises everywhere. In services, in a top-level component, or in for loops. In react, people use apollo/redux-query or redux-saga to handle network calls. Since these libraries prevent duplicate network calls internally and reassigning apollo network call function or redux action function is always useless, it's easy to spot all network calls in a component tree.

In angular, it's difficult to trace data mutations when data can be updated everywhere. In react, you can easily find UI state updates by tracing state hooks/dispatch/apollo usages.

In angular, it's difficult to trace data pipeline. Since everything is imperative by default, people need to add update functions in data subscriptions. With all the littered mutations. Soon you will lose track of what the fuck is going on.

I hope angular get the agonizing death it deserves and fuck everyone who codes JS OOP clusterfuck UI.

React, it's declarative way of doing things, and the functional programming methodology it prefers.

Realized how much I've moved on from for-loops and class/object instance to maps, filters and immutability/observers when I worked on a Laravel project after so long and found myself forced to do things in the, erm, "PHP" way, despite spending my initial year and a half of programming working exclusively in PHP.

Sure, there's Class Components and imperative techniques in React but I had blissfully settled into using the flexible nature of doing things enabled by both native JS and React, with hooks, Lodash/Ramda and (almost fanatically) pure functions

Day one as a teaching assistant in Imperative Programming. Wish me luck

Tired of imperative different-yet-all-the-same programing languages. What's the most awesome funcional language ever?

Bonus: sweet projects you've done in that language

I’ve abandoned the classic for loop from my tool belt for quite a long time now. The vast majority of the code is functional.

But today I’ve encountered a problem where I’m considering to use the imperative for loop again because I can’t come up with a good functional approach.

Maybe you guys have an idea.

I have a list of items and I want to make a new list which is like the original list, but it has extra items in between of some other items.

The tricky part is that there is a condition that needs to be checked for each pair of items to determine if the new item should be inserted in between. Otherwise nothing should be inserted.

I think I understand now why people dislike continuation passing style for side effects. The continuations passed to the action can be called in any pattern, there's no inherent guarantee that an error handler cannot be called just because the corresponding success handler had already been called. In this regard they act like jump points in assembly more than functions in an equation.

I don't think this is such a massive problem. The entire imperative world is built on such things. I definitely think though that this model does not mix with autocurry.

More frequent commits are imperative to your sanity!

Trying to find a code change in git, and I stumbled across a commit comment I can't even remember doing!

Trees -> declarative programming

Loops -> functional programming

Sequences -> imperative programming

Graphs -> dynamic programming

Good mapping, yeah or no?

There should be no debate about
statically typed vs dynamic,
functional vs imperative,
single vs multi namespace
(lisp-1 vs lisp-2),
or anything like that:
it always boils down to
simple vs complex,
where
simple is the unquestioned winner.

What's the easiest functional programming language for someone with experience with imperative languages?

I would like to learn a functional language to broaden my horizons. I have knowledge of Python and C / C ++ and I want the language to be easy to learn from someone who comes from the imperative realm of languages. I don't care if the language is strong enough. I just need a language to learn the basics of a functional programming language, and then I'll try to find a more complex (and powerful) one.

thank

FP features in OO/Imperative languages are more Data Oriented Programming (DOP) features than FP. Clojure popularised the term and now every FP language is trying to say “oooh FP is mainstream now”.

No its not. Nobody really cares if you managed to create this beautiful effect system that can emulate what OOP does for decades now. What people care is making data transformations simple and flat.

When you work with statisticians and their idea of software development involves 1000loc long imperative scripts

I recently refactored a form with complex client side interactivity for one of my clients replacing jquery with vuejs in the process and I'm absolutely baffled by how easier it is to reason about everything when you think of the UI as a function of the state. Only devs who have done both imperative and declarative DOM manipulation at some point in their life can understand the joy of doing this. And all of this can be done with just a simple script tag without having to bring in complex build process that has plagued the Javascript ecosystem.

val true : bool = isFrustrated(me : Human)

1) Honestly fuck SML. Who's goddamn idea was it to make a useless fucking programming language that does absolutely nothing relevant unless you're trying to learn recursion. Who's fucking idea was it to not be able to even have side effects. And who gives a shit if you can explicitly declare the type of variables on every single fucking line that's what comments are for if you really need it. All this is aside from the fact that nobody ever has been like "OH UNMUTABLE TYPES? WOW IM SO HAPPY THIS IS SO USEFUL". At this point I feel like SML is basically a DFA - ABSOLUTELY FUCKING USELESS

2) Aside from that, who's idea was it to duplicate two classes. There's 15-122 (Principles of Imperative Computation) and 15-150 (Principles of Functional Programming). So far the ONLY fucking thing different is we learned about work and span in 15-150 - OTHER THAN THAT ITS LIKE TAKING THE EXACT SAME COURSE. BUT AGAIN. So then I have to fucking sit in lecture and pay attention for that tiny bit of information that is new amongst the giant cesspool of information that isn't. BECAUSE I ALREADY LEARNED IT.
Oh and did I mention that both classes are required to graduate as a CS major? Fuck me.

Thanks devRant for helping <3

Edit: We are 4 weeks into the semester so you'd expect we'd have gotten into the new stuff by now right????

Okay. Here's the ONLY two scenarios where automated testing is justified:
- An outsourcing company who is given the task of bug elimination in legacy code with a really short timeframe. Then yes, writing tests is like waging war on bugs, securing more and more land inch after inch.
- A company located in an area where hiring ten junior developers is cheaper than hiring one principal developer. Then yes, the business advantage is very real.

That's it. That's the only two scenarios where automated testing is justified. Other such scenarios doesn't exist.

Why? Because any robust testing system (not just "adding some tests here and there") is a _declarative_ one. On top of already being declarative (opposed to the imperative environment where the actual code exists), if you go further and implement TDD, your tests suddenly begins to describe your domain area, turning into a declarative DSL.

Such transformations are inevitable. You can't catch bugs in the first place if your tests are ignorant of entities your code is working with.

That being said, any TDD-driven project consists of two things:
- Imperative code that implements business logic
- Declarative DSL made of automated tests that also describes the same business logic

Can't you see that this system is _wet_? The tests set alone in a TDD-driven project are enough to trivially derive the actual, complete code from it.

It's almost like it's easier to just write in a declarative language in the first place, in the same way tests are written in TDD project, and scrap the imperative part altogether.

In imperative languages, absence of errors can be mathematically guaranteed. In imperative languages, the best performance (e.g. the lowest algorithmic complexity) can also be mathematically guaranteed. There is a perfectly real point after which Haskell rips C apart in terms of performance, and that point happens earlier on than you think.

If you transitioned from a junior who doesn't get why tests are needed to a competent engineer who sees value in TDD, that's amazing. But like with any professional development, it's better to remember that it's always possible to go further. After the two milestones I described, the third exists — the complete shift into the declarative world.

For a human brain, it's natural to blindly and aggressively reject whatever information leads to the need of exiting the comfort zone. Hence the usual shitstorm that happens every time I say something about automated testing. I understand you, and more than that, I forgive you.

The only advice I would allow myself to give you is just for fun, on a weekend, open a tutorial to a language you never tried before, and spend 20 minutes messing around with it. Maybe you'll laugh at me, but that's the exact way I got from earning $200 to earning $3500 back when I was hired as a CTO for the first time.

Good luck!

How to keep an imperative programmer busy for hours?

tell them the syntax for swapping two variables in Haskell is:

let a=b; b=a in <exp>

While programming is imperative (how to x) rather than declarative (x = y) (mathematics), it deceives me from the idea that I won't have to touch a lot of math.

To my dismay, I now realize that in order for the imperative process to be correct, I have to do immense amounts of declarative thinking (algorithms, proofs,..). That which is written has to work.

Well to be honest with you concerning this coding practice. As a deliberated of obsession without coming from a divers angle of reasoning,by application of ardent and candid Wisdom,and more on a logical pattern of presentations,even in the absence of sentimental aggregations I will move with a conspicuous and convertible analysis,base on imperative understanding of this matter,having in mind not to be influenced by perceptional retroversion which can interfere with good judgmental alibis. Hmm therefore, I will advice or come to a conclusion that point going too deeper cause this is just untainted matters of circumvention and irrational amplitude.Do you comprehend or should I go deeper?

I know that when your code is in PR Process its a good oportunity to improve but I dont want my TL think I am useless... It was a good way to verify how he likes to work and that he is a functional approach fun but I would like to give him the image of being accountable... This is my 2nd week...
I would like to know if there is a place where you can grab imperative java code so as to practice... I wont run like crazy to transform all to functional but would like to be awared..
We are using Java Vavr library which is amazing...