Comment by anon291
3 months ago
Realistically we don't but it's very rare to meet a programmer who understands these distinctions thats not also a great functional programmer.
This is my experience after spending five years as a Haskell programmer and managing a Haskell team for several years and now moving back to the c++ world to play with AI.
I know lots of good c++ programmers working on cutting edge stuff, real experts in their field, but they sometimes still don't have a clear way to understand how to model data
That is my opinion. It's probably highly contentious.
I've actually had to fire a technically exceptional Haskell programmer because of the damage they did to our C# codebase (and arguably moreso, the team). Sometimes it's not a matter of talent or skill, but culture fit.
In my experience FP-aligned people on non-FP projects tend to be more likely to overengineer, more prone to argue in favor of the Great Rewrite For No Reason Except Aesthetics, and more likely to abuse "lesser" programmers when they put up PRs. They suck as team players on teams that are not made of language nerds. I am not just talking about the one person here who I fired, this is a legit pattern I've noticed over at least a half dozen people.
Conversely, they are exactly the right people to deploy when you have really tough, self-contained problems to solve that you wouldn't trust the normal Java 9-5ers to tackle.
No matter how they do it, you can always rewrite their working code in a more maintainable language later once it's working, and make it integrate well with the rest of your stack. :D
Your story matches my experience, but it always makes me think, why did this person want to work with you in the first place?
A great Haskell programmer (generally speaking) is going to be a culture misfit in any Java, C#, golang, etc shop. I know because I've been that miserable bastard who loves functional programming working with Java devs who don't know anything about FP and couldn't care less. To be clear I'm not saying you can't find a compatible Java shop (I actually did find a startup with a lot of Java devs who appreciated FP and used much of it in Java, and that was pretty great honestly), just that the odds are highly against you.
My biggest advice to people who like FP is: Find a job in a language like Clojure, Elixir, Scala, etc. There are a lot more jobs than you'd think. But if you can't, Ruby and Javascript/Typescript can be pretty close depending on where you go. Talk to existing devs and see how feel about FP in general before you join though!
This is my experience, too. Some of the worst code I‘ve seen was a Haskell guy who first built his own (reactive?) concurrency framework and then implemented the actual functionality in completely unidiomatic and undocumented Java.
Some people don’t understand that the „best solution“ is not necessarily equal to the most beautiful abstraction they can think of.
> Some of the best code I‘ve seen
There, fixed it for you.
But I have to be fair, whenever I see a demand for "idio(ma)tic code" I know that this is a place to avoid, no matter if they are imperatively or functionally inclined.
I mean sure. Realistically, I'm certain I would do that if I were working on a typical code base, which is why I'm in an extremely niche field where that sort of thing is valued. From my extremely biased perspective, these are the 'hard' problems that need solving, versus the general run of the mill operational things. That probably sounds pretentious, but it takes skills for both.