What attracts people to being a programmer? For some people it’s “looks like a reasonable job with good pay and conditions”. For others, it’s more “I love computers, programming, and abstract puzzles to solve”. This latter group (of which I am one), is more likely to provide both benefits and problems.
The benefit is they will generally be capable of greater innovation than the former group, but the downside is that they may just focus on interesting puzzles and ignore the needs of the (boring) business. Choosing an exotic language will greatly tilt the ratios towards this later group.
Most people in this later group can discipline themselves to focus on delivery, while remaining a great resource when truely challenging puzzles pop up. Most, but not all. Choosing a very esoteric language is pushing the curve far towards this tail, and the result will be many “brilliant, but useless to our business, people”.
Every small business needs a strong technical leader. I’m convinced of this. You need someone in charge that can stop the arguments, make people put down their toys, and remove people that cannot contribute for whatever reason. So this is my conclusion, it’s boring like so much of business. You need the right manager.
I love myself computers and probably more so earlier in my career than now, but I also like influencing people (often through code, with a focus less on algorithmic elegance but instead more on setting patterns, tooling, and APIs that influence how others build around them); and I also enjoy the challenge of aligning the pleasure of a juicy piece of elegant code against the pleasure of positive business outcomes. I think that makes me neither a “boring business person” nor a diehard code nerd, but somewhere at the intersection with attributes in other directions not captured by either stereotype.
That said, if you really are 100% motivated by abstract technical challenges, then maybe academia is more for you than industry is. Or working at the small slice of companies that truly make their bread and butter on cutting edge technical excellence and not, say, applying tried and true tools to some underserved niche.
I do find the “algorithm nerd” charisma also tends to intersect with having warped views of how the world operates and weak self-awareness, so maybe easier said than personally realized.
Of course. Such people very typically attempt to get a foothold in academia. The central reason why they nevertheless leave academia is because of the precarious job situation.
Thank you in advance.
> The benefit is they will generally be capable of greater innovation than the former group, but the downside is that they may just focus on interesting puzzles and ignore the needs of the (boring) business.
I think the problem rather is that many "business people" have a deep hate against people who love to think about whether there is a deeper hidden mathematical structure behind the business problems. Just to be clear: there also exist some few business people who appreciate this, but the latter are typically "nerds" who mostly switched to business because it pays much better.
It's not my experience that the latter group of programmers ignores the business problems, they just rather have their own much less anti-intellectual way of approaching them.
Yup and lots of whom started with programming as a hobby, and could chase after any shiny thing they saw, or run off whenever on any side quest that interested them.
Nobody wants to pay you hundreds of thousands of dollars to navel gaze, or run off down whatever path you feel is mathematically satisfying. Do that on your own time. You're being paid hundreds of thousands dollars to deliver business value - so do that. Build mathematical towers on your own time.
It's like paying someone by the day to paint your house and they paint the Mona Lisa in white paint on white and take 3x as long because it's more artistically beautiful even if the end result is just an all white painted house.
"Don't you see the deeper hidden artistic structure!?"
I found out that unicorns are unicorns.
To me, this doesn't seem to be a problem unique to functional programming languages. You'd have this problem when choosing any language outside the mainstream, I think.
From the article:
> Then, one thing leads to another, and you're knee deep in learning about homotopy type theory or continuations or whatever. Meanwhile, you're a week behind on that Jira ticket for issuing JSON Web Tokens because there's no actively maintained JWT libraries for Gooby.
You wouldn't have this problem in the first place if the language you chose -did- have an actively maintained JWT library.
Like, a company that chooses Haskell is a lot more likely to run into this problem than a company that chooses Clojure, due to the simple fact that Clojure can use Java libraries, whereas Haskell exists within its own isolated ecosystem. So, between the two, the likelihood is generally lower that you will, in the first place, run into a problem that Clojure can't easily solve.
So, in my mind, this essentially boils down to the same sort of risk/reward assessment you always need to make when choosing any language for any project.
And that's why we switch languages constantly. For some problems, some languages suck a little less.
Most programming languages are pretty neat. Learning is a joy. That's why language hops are fun and common.
But yes, few things make me cringe more than someone selling themselves short by introducing themselves as a $LANG dev
I only have one life and I prefer not to suffer too much; switching languages is not helping me at all in preventing that suffering.
Actively maintained does not mean it’s good. We have to read and fork all libs we use (regulatory) so it won’t end up getting hacked etc, at least, less likely and a lot of ‘actively maintained libraries’ especially npms/pips are total garbage. We often spend less time just rolling ourselves than figuring out if this unreadable, overarchitected resume driven garbage even works.
It's hard to know from an interview what the quality of your Haskell code is.
It's probably relatively easy to find out in an interview that you had a lot of trouble with Clojure and are currently porting to Java.
Please explain.
They way overspent their strangeness budget[0] at every step of the stack. Even though I love (this) Gooby in general, in this case it has caused extreme damage to the organization.
I am still angry at the original devs for their choices because they basically poisoned the whole org against the language even though it would be useful for the org as a whole to adopt it in a non psychotic manner. It basically resulted in a reflexive ban for all Gooby in the future even when it might make sense.
[0] https://steveklabnik.com/writing/the-language-strangeness-bu...
The company hired a very smart charlatan and he convinced them to start a greenfield project in Haskell. Then they need to hire Haskell developers for this specific thing because everyone else only knows Java and Python. Nearly a year later they're barely getting started, but it's getting hyped like you couldn't believe. A lot of sprint planning time starts to become 'how do we start integrating [New thing]' because the Directors have been fluffing it so hard.
Anyway it never got used in prod. The development turned into a disaster and the original guy quit. The team got dismantled and the whole thing got memory-holed. Anyone in the org hearing the word "Haskell" would invariably just think about it lol
Couple that with other challenges of running a niche stack in production and it can be quite a burden. Experienced, pragmatic developers will have techniques for managing this even in a functional language, but again, pragmatic may require compromise that doesn’t sit well with the purist.
But with FP, it seems like it is always the answer. And it's even better if your Operating System can be immutable too. And your build scripts. And, even if it take 10 times as long to write, at least we will be confident that it's type safe at the end.
It's almost always better to 'play' in a language that abstracts everything away except for the problem domain. Not like Rust, which introduces multiple complex language domains to learn before you can play wih your target domain.
What is your favorite programming language/library/technology?
What do you hate about it?
Anyone that jumps to answer the first but struggles to answer the second is likely not someone you want to hire.
Lack of libraries.
Lack of good tools.
But I think that author is missing at least one more category: senior engineers that worked in multiple programming languages over their career, who can see how design of Gooby and values of it's community create a better programming environment.
I once wrote some Haskell professionally. It was a successor to a previous generation of the application that I had written in Python and maintained for several years. Using Haskell was my choice and it was made because some of Haskell’s strengths would address specific pain points learned from that experience. Meanwhile, everything else I wrote for that client was still being done in mainstream languages for mainstream reasons and there was never any suggestion that we would rewrite anything else in Haskell or adopt it by default for any new work, so I think this situation is clearly distinct from category 3 in the article.
What’s the right language? Probably the language you’re already using for the rest of your stuff so we can interface with the rest of the org efficiently.
Is it new? Grab whatever the industry standard is for your segment. Lots of libs, lots of mindshare, easy to hire, get it done.
I do get caught in HR filters a lot without a bunch of projects in gooby though.
When you learn a programming language for a few weeks, the knowledge will be very superficial. Rather consider a few years of additional learning outside and in addition to the job to be realistic to get a decent understanding of the very encompassing and non-trivial details of the programming language, its lore, its culture and its often huge ecosystem.
This is the right attitude
This is incredible
Multi-armed bandits were introduced in the 50s, years after the end of World War 2.
> As I said, the problem is a classic one; it was formulated during the war, and efforts to solve it so sapped the energies and minds of Allied analysts that the suggestion was made that the problem be dropped over Germany, as the ultimate instrument of intellectual sabotage.
[0]: https://academic.oup.com/jrsssb/article-pdf/41/2/164/4909740...
And this article sadly shows why. Objectively, they aren't fair to "Goody engineers". Often, they mean opinionated engineers. Now opinionated engineers can be good and bad for profits - they work hard and point maybe good direction and maybe bad directions. But they make the company harder to sell and that objectively reduces the stock price and so it's bad from the "economic standpoint" even if it makes profits somewhat higher.
Be careful with this statement: many programmers value very different properties of the product than the typical customer.
You get programming astronauts in every language. There’s nothing special about Gooby or functional programmers that makes them deficient in the ways described. You could easily replace Gooby with Rust, Lisp, Python, C++, C#, Java, JS.
What makes the functional programming astronauts stand out is pure optics. If you’re tolerant of C++ templates or Python’s metaclasses you might view discussions on Profunctors to sound like gibberish. If you’re not someone who even uses those tools at all and avoid them out of principal it can sound like a plot for a hostile takeover. To an experienced Haskell programmer it’s likely to be fairly banal.
Which kind of blows this whole theory that Gooby programmers are the problem.
The real problem are those who seek to use a hammer regardless of what problem they’re trying to solve. I’m certain anyone whose been around for a while had encountered the “patterns astronaut,” who will view every problem as an opportunity to figure out how to apply as many GoF patterns as possible. These are the misguided souls we need to bring back into the fold.
After a posting on the Haskell mailing list, zero responses came back.
We realized the world had about 3 people that matched all the requirements: one was the dev that needed to be replaced, the other one was a tenured professor of a U.S. university (Hi, Hal!), and there was one more, whom I don't remember but it may just as well have been Simon Peyton-Jones himself (only slightly exaggerating here).
Note the Haskel NLP mailing list - https://archives.haskell.org/projects-pipermail/nlp/ - did not exist then, it was formed only in 2009.
In the end, I forced a complete re-write in Java of our initial "rapidly prototyped" Haskell codebase at the time, and I often wonder what I would do nowadays, nearly 20 years later (Python is slow, has the commercial disadvantage of letting customers read off your secret sauce if code runs on their machines, but has a good dev pool to hire from, and definitely is both high-level enough as well as suitable regarding library support; ironically, Java is still a contender, despite the boilerplate Kotlin isn't getting the traction that Rust is getting against C, C++ has changed dramatically every 5 years in the 20 years since, and still ads complexity, which is all very scary, and Julia has a small talent pool, and isn't ready for prime time yet, certainly not regarding NLP libraries).
I know, since this is HN, people will say "LISP!", but I'm not sure; I always loved the aestetics of Scheme, but not the ergonomics - and my conjecture is there might be something about keywords that makes them superior cognitively for humans compared to just piles of nested parentheses.
EDIT: fixed a typo.
Whether this is true depends a lot on the product and the tech that is used.
It's the nature of the language and the VM that it runs in. The code is data and data is code. You can construct a list and then decide to evaluate it. Or the current code you're writing is actually data for another piece of code. It's a paradigm that really opens the computation mindset.
The VM looks like the common REPL you see in Python, but it's more powerful. It's more like a OS installation than a language interpreter. You can inspect anything, patch anything. When paired with an editor, that means you can only apply part of the code and then rerun part of the code. You can also try stuff and then formalize stuff down in code, no need to rerun the whole program.
For me, the parenthesis are the same as Python's whitespaces and colons. Or C-like language and their brackets and semicolons. Just syntax. After a while, you just don't notice them other than check that the expression is correct.
I’ve heard this a lot about Lisp. But doesn't this lead to greater cognitive complexity because every time you patch your running code, you have to keep in mind the state of the running program and mentally check whether your patch affects any part of that state?
A lot of people do data analysis this way in R/Python who aren’t programmers either by training or for a living, and it is not a practice that generally leads to bug-free outcomes. This has also mirrored my experience with Emacs which is a Lisp machine, maybe getting closer to Common Lisp’s programming environment.
Is this process of runtime modification fundamentally different in CL? What am I misunderstanding?
I have a long history of doing FP in a bunch of the traditional FP languages (Scheme/Haskell/etc). Ended up working at a young startup with equally young employees awhile back and was sort of surprised to see that the long heralded fantasy of cranky FP enthusiasts has, for better or worse, come true in Type Script.
I saw a generation of new programmers truly doing type-driven development and using a range of functional programming techniques without them even realizing that this was a big thing. Funnily enough they were terrified of anything resembling object oriented programming. If the word "class" appeared in the code base (their was some Python), they would quietly walk away.
What I saw was also incredible because these, largely junior, programmers were using types for exactly the thing old-Haskell people had hoped they would. Things would ship to prod lightning fast as all engineers had to do was make sure the types all lined up and the compiler was happy and they would send the PR off!
But then I saw the downside: these type-happy programmers almost never tested anything. I'm not talking about formal unit tests or integration tests, some of those existed. I mean these were programmers that had entirely lost (or maybe never had) the ability to play around with the code that they just wrote and make sure it worked. I kid you not, "print debugging" was viewed as some advanced technique to do in emergency situations. When bugs were introduced to prod I would ask "did this work when you ran it locally?" only to be met with quizzical stares. If it pasted the type check it was good to go.
It also had the negative consequence of inadvertently discouraging abstraction in favor of just adding more complexity to your existing types. Because refactoring code takes time and the entire point of the type check doing all your thinking is to ship fast.
All that said, I'd much rather work with that code base than one made by a similarly proficient team in say Ruby.
There are tons of skilled (and less skilled) functional programmers out there. The real problem is if you're looking for both highly competent programmers who also happened to be hung up on a particular niche language. I'm sure there are plenty of excellent "Gooby" engineers out there, but they likely choose jobs based on other factors than the language being used.
The fear of OOP is a problem though. I've encountered some really bad TypeScript/JS codebases that were just piles of top level functions for everything. The meme that OOP is bad is really damaging.
> But then I saw the downside: these type-happy programmers almost never tested anything.
I acknowledge, however, a lot of people never think to do this when starting their business, and consequently run into all sorts of this kind of trouble, sadly.
Getting lost in the "tech $X is better for this than $Y" can easily become a distraction. Engineering is a form of applied science for money.
Since it's economically driven, the two most important things you as an engineer need to know are:
- who is paying for this?
- why?
Those two questions should underpin every single decision you make. If you lose sight of that, theres a huge chance you won't succeed.
A fair amount of this article is observing this problem persists 60 years later.
That's because you know you'll be stuck with maintaining the solution. Nowadays, we have resume-driven people that just build stuff without any care as they know they're only here for two or three years.
There’s plenty of mainstream programming languages that get the job done just fine without the hiring problems.
I’m 100% certain you don’t “need” gooby.
Hiring for gooby doesn’t scale, so unless your company’s goal is to stay small, don’t use gooby. And “the CTO likes it” isn’t good enough reason.
The original gooby loving CTO always leaves to spread more gooby to other companies and the owners of the company are left with a long term problem.
Just use the garden variety languages that there is a large talent pool for.
Do your gooby at home on your personal projects.
Hire people for embedded C and you will run into some some people to whom C programming and their side projects in it are more important than whatever you're trying to ship.
Substitute anything. Rust, C++, Ruby, Java, ...
And of course the resume stuffing (1) people are also a language-independent problem.
Certain languages probably won't have too many people in the (2) category (excited recent grads). But those are the good candidates in relation to (1) and (3), according to the Gooby analysis in the article.
Honestly we should have written it in C, but I'm too far down the totem pole to make that call
Regarding sidenote #1, I actually very deliberately did not mention the language or company ;) Here's the full text of the sidenote, if you're still unable to get it rendering:
> I'm not going to name the language itself, because this post would just turn into a flame war over that language specifically, and I definitely don't want to cast shade on any language/community in particular. I'm also kind of hoping that the most annoying people read this and think, "Ah, of course he's talking about that language over there! This criticism obviously doesn't apply to my perfect and favorite language!" Regardless, I feel that the thesis and content of this post applies pretty evenly to most functional programming languages.
So, where's the difference? One doesn't care about what they sell as longs it makes them money, the other as long they have fun.
However, I think that we all need to be a little more honest with ourselves as software engineers. […] Are you sure you don't use Gooby just because it's fun to write?
Why? I use raku every day just because it’s fun to write!
No. I don’t do anything (by choice) if it is not fun.
Usually, there are some good, pragmatic reasons why something gets selected, and it is always accompanied by trade-offs. The decision is not mine alone to make; we need buy-in from everyone on the team. If the choice turns out to be not very delightful or fun, it becomes obvious - replace it. My initial reaction to the question "Why are you using Gooby? I've never even heard about it..." is always "because it's fun"
And it is absolutely normal to become a team where everyone enjoys Gooby, and they'd try to hire like-minded people.
I've certainly seen people in the Haskell teams I've worked on who fit the article's description of people who were there to write Haskell and didn't care about much else. It didn't go great, but they were a minority of the people I've worked with.
Importantly, I've also seen plenty of that kind of behavior in other teams using other tech stacks. I've worked with "Agile people" whose answer to every problem is pair programming. I've worked with people who only care about microservices, or their favorite frontend framework. I've worked with people who see more object orientation as the solution to every problem more often than I've seen people who want to apply FP to every problem.
A few of these people can be find to have on a medium or larger sized team- if the worst of their instincts are tempered they can be a great source of internal education and advocacy, and they can bring expertise that can help you deal with the inevitable problems and tradeoffs that come with any technical choice. You just need to be careful to, on balance, have a team of mostly product-minded people.
Product people aren't necessarily tech-stack agnostic. To use myself as an example, I really like functional programming and I think it's often a good technical choice. At the end of the day though, my job is a job and I'm there to build the best product I can to make my employer (and myself) money. I've turned down Haskell jobs because I didn't believe in the product or team, and taken jobs in less preferred tech stacks because I did. A lot of people can be both enthusiasts and pragmatists, you just need to look for them.
I think one of the biggest issues I have with the article is that it overlooks a significant source of hiring: product minded people who are open to, but not specifically enthusiastic about your tech stack. People don't need to be an FP enthusiast to work in a functional language. I've written a lot of Python and Go in my career, even though neither of them are my favorite language. By the same token, there are plenty of people who can work with Haskell, OCaml, or a lisp just fine with a bit of training even if FP isn't something they are going to devote themselves to. I've worked with a lot of people who do Haskell in their day job, but prefer to spend their free time using Rust.
None of this is to say that everyone should go out and use an FP language. I think the most important factor in picking a language is generally going to be picking something that your team likes and understands well. Most languages are good enough at most problems that individual preference is going to matter more than technical concerns. If Haskell or OCaml or Gooby is that preferred language for your team, I don't think you should avoid it.
I'm yet to meet an FP fanatic who actually properly understood OOP. Few seem to even understand the core principles of 'high cohesion, loose coupling' and fewer are even able translate that into a programming methodology.
My view of FP proponents is the opposite as the author claims. They're not rockstars who can master anything. More like the opposite; they're often people who are incapable of taking something complex and simplifying it. They're people who can't keep complexity under control and they need an external tool to do it for them.
Excuse me? Haven't a ton of things in recent years been simplified by borrowing ideas from FP? LINQ in C#, Flask route decorators in Python, React Hooks and Redux reducers, Rx in Angular, Kafka streams, and more?
> Few seem to even understand the core principles
They do understand specific pain points experienced outside of FP - side effects, mutable state, uncontrolled complexity. Many FP proponents are well-versed in OOP but choose FP for reasons like simpler state management, declarative syntax, and powerful concurrency models.
> They're people who can't keep complexity under control
> they're often people who are incapable of taking something complex and simplifying it.
FP langs specifically provide advantages for easier reasoning about code, deterministic functions, and improved reusability. Why would someone willingly want to try and take control of exploding complexity if they have already know better tools to manage it? Tools that they understand more thoroughly and that feel more "natural" to them, closely aligning with mathematical function theory. Math is already one of the best tools for describing a vast number of things in the entire universe. Why would anyone who understands math want to go study some other voodoo-doll piercing technique, even if it claims to be particularly effective at solving specific problems?
I understand everyone that goes into functional programming after realizing classes of problems don't exist there. I like guardrails. I learned to like immutable functional data structures after realizing 70% of time is Java serialization in the flame graph and I'd rather had the clojure way of solving these problems instead of the hidden magic. But properly learning all the mentioned tools and not abusing them would be enough.
You just haven't met one who has realized that monads in FP map roughly to objects in OOP yet. :) Both are used for the same broad things: encapsulating/hiding/controlling state and allowing state transformations to be sequenced.
I actually have great sympathy for the functional programmer: having decided that managing both kinds of complexity is mentally exhausting, the functional programmer opts to eliminate, as much as possible, the accidental complexity of willy-nilly side effects in order to better address the inherent complexity of the problem domain. A good programmer can write mostly referentially transparent code with controlled side effects in any language, but it takes more care and forethought to do so in, say, Java.
This is why I say Lisp is really for bad programmers. If you're a programming genius, you can apply the same principles used in Lisp all the time to Java or even C++ code... it's just more work. Work you may not even notice because that stuff comes natural to you. But if you're a mid programmer, much of the friction of working in Java or C++ goes away in Lisp and you feel relieved of a burden. Much more feels within your reach. (I happen to love Lisp, and prefer working in it to anything else if I can, so maybe I'm a bad programmer.)
It is no coincidence that an expressive functional language like Haskell has concise, descriptive names for numerous common folding patterns over common data structures such as mapAccumWithKey¹ that let you express what you want to achieve in just a line or two of code with minimal boilerplate or ambiguity, where using a generic loop in a mainstream imperative language would take 3x that and need a little thought to recognise the pattern being used and make sure there wasn’t anything else happening that was tangled up in the same code.
¹ https://hackage.haskell.org/package/containers-0.7/docs/Data...
I think one of the problems is that we just don’t have people that we admire in programming compared to other areas like biology or literature.