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0 pointsepgui3y ago0 comments

In life, there are a lot of obvious things that are very difficult to teach.

For example, I'm a biochemist with 12 years of education, and I can't seem to be able to convince anyone that vaccines are safer than no vaccines.

Humans just don't like new things or changing their mind, and that's a very generalizable fact, even among very smart groups of intelligent engineers.

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blep_3y ago

The typical argument for vaccines is much less shaky than the typical argument for pure FP. For one, vaccine people can actually explain why vaccines are good. FP people seem to mostly just repeat variations on "it's easier to reason about" and showing trivial functions that are generally not easier to reason about.

Imagine trying to get people to accept vaccines, but in a world where we have other types of medicine that usually works well enough for all the things you've developed vaccines for, and the only argument you're allowed to make is "it's obviously better, look at how amazingly liquid the stuff in this syringe is".

You'll still get some resistance, but in our current world, pure FP is much more of a niche thing than pro-vaccine stances. There's a reason for that.

knaekhoved3y ago

> The typical argument for vaccines is much less shaky than the typical argument for pure FP.

I suspect you aren't that knowledgeable about either.

> For one, vaccine people can actually explain why vaccines are good.

Unless you have a very particular background, I'm suspicious that you can actually follow the frontier of that argument. More likely, you're getting the ELI5 explanation.

> FP people seem to mostly just repeat variations on "it's easier to reason about" and showing trivial functions that are generally not easier to reason about.

Well-designed FP languages reify coherent low-complexity formal semantics. When FP advocates say "reason about", they mean in a (semi-)formal sense. No popular imperative language has any kind of denotational semantics, so good luck reasoning about the compositional behavior of C++ libraries, unless your definition of "reason about" is "think about informally".

sidlls3y ago

> Unless you have a very particular background, I'm suspicious that you can actually follow the frontier of that argument. More likely, you're getting the ELI5 explanation.

People who actually understand complex things are able to provide ELI5 level explanations for people who haven't the background for more rigor. You're presenting a false representation of the OP's comment anyway: it never suggested the explanation for why vaccines are good required "frontier" level discourse.

> Well-designed FP languages reify coherent low-complexity formal semantics.

This is such a great example of what so many of us have noted about FP evangelists. It's so divorced from writing software as to be gibberish.

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