Author Topic: Anyone tried their hand at functional programming?  (Read 2887 times)

-KEN-

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Anyone tried their hand at functional programming?
« on: July 07, 2012, 05:40:11 PM »
Reading the book "Clojure Programming" and trying my hand at functional programming. Anyone else use a Lisp-y language? It's certainly interesting so far. The concept has this simple nature that is very attractive. Who knows how it ends up in a larger project.

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Re: Anyone tried their hand at functional programming?
« Reply #1 on: July 08, 2012, 09:37:24 AM »
I teach a lab for a first year Scheme course. Functional programming is a fun exercise but I don't think I'd ever use it for a real project.

ober

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Re: Anyone tried their hand at functional programming?
« Reply #2 on: July 08, 2012, 09:33:05 PM »
I think RTML (Yahoo store language) is based on Lisp and would probably fall into that category.  I'm actually learning it right now for a client of mine.  So far, I fucking hate it.

-KEN-

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Re: Anyone tried their hand at functional programming?
« Reply #3 on: July 09, 2012, 08:40:10 PM »
I teach a lab for a first year Scheme course. Functional programming is a fun exercise but I don't think I'd ever use it for a real project.

That's what I'm wondering -- how useful is it in a big project? Clojure itself has a lot of libraries because it runs on the JVM, so it's certainly capable in that regard. I see it as maybe interesting for certain bits of a project.

I think RTML (Yahoo store language) is based on Lisp and would probably fall into that category.  I'm actually learning it right now for a client of mine.  So far, I fucking hate it.

RTML looks freakin' awful. Paul Graham apparently helped write it, so maybe it has some LISP-like characteristics, but that shit looks more like FORTRAN.

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Re: Anyone tried their hand at functional programming?
« Reply #4 on: July 09, 2012, 08:43:35 PM »
Yeah, apparently that RTML thing is implemented using lisp, but the actual language doesn't look lisp-ish at all, it looks pretty nasty.

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Re: Anyone tried their hand at functional programming?
« Reply #5 on: July 10, 2012, 08:54:33 AM »
Yeah, so far, not a fan.  But my client is tired of hiring other random firms to help him with it and I've been working for him for about 5 years now and he's ready to just throw some money at me to figure it out and centralize everything.

The worst thing about those Yahoo stores is that most custom functionality cannot be built into the store itself.  So as it stands right now, he's hired 2 different companies to write custom stuff and each one has Javascript calls to PHP files located on their servers to make everything work. Unfortunately all I'm really going to be doing is taking all of that functionality and moving it to his VPS but at least it's all in one place and no fear of failure if one of the other companies goes down.

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Re: Anyone tried their hand at functional programming?
« Reply #6 on: July 10, 2012, 10:05:03 AM »
I wrote a bunch of GIMP plugins a few years ago and those were in scheme.  Not really a fan but it is different and interesting.