Do I have to learn Functional Programming to get a decent developer job?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18860329

by mosh_java • 8 years ago

10 24 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Recently I noticed the functional programming is attracting more developers I know and most of them would like to work for big/giant development companies like Google and Facebook, do I have to learn a functional programming language or frameworks to get more decent development job?

bwooster• 8 years ago

auslegung2• 8 years ago

No. However, learning functional programming has been the best thing to improve my skill as a developer so far, so I highly recommend it

snazz• 8 years ago

This. You might not need it, but the more paradigms you learn, the more easily you’ll be able to learn a new language for work. Once you’ve got the main paradigms down, learning a new language is basically just learning the syntactical idiosyncrasies.

phaus• 8 years ago

Are there any good books/resources to learn functional programming for a beginner?

I know the syntax for like 5+ languages but I've never made anything beyond simple command-line programs.

db48x• 8 years ago

I recommend Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Sussman and Abelson. By the end you'll have learned functional, procedural, and object-oriented programming, and how they're related.

Both the book (https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html) and a series of video lectures based on it are available online (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...)

auslegung2• 8 years ago

Thinking Functionally was an OK book. We use Haskell and I’ve found Haskell from First Principles and Learn You a Haskell both to be very good for learning not only the language but functional programming in general.

hackermailman• 8 years ago

This Cornell gitbook is creative commons licensed and teaches both functional programming concepts and OCaml datastructures

  wget -mkEpnp http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/2018fa/textbook/

Plus this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM2hEBwEWPc Effective ML is interesting, shows how to better write ML family programs so other people can read them, and making illegal states unrepresentable where he talks through splicing up interfaces to make them more robust by taking advantage of the type system.

AnimalMuppet• 8 years ago

Have to? No. I would guess that 90% of programming is not functional (all statistics made up on the spot).

Knowing functional will open some doors, in terms of careers, and also some doors in your mind. Either set of doors may be helpful to have opened, but neither is required to have a long and profitable career in software.

UK-Al05• 8 years ago

Very few companies are looking for functional developers.

But I'd argue it will make you a more skilled developer.

Khelavaster• 8 years ago

No, but your options are limited to Java and embedded shops. You absolutely ought to understand functional programming to develop .Net- or Javascript-based applications.

wahern• 8 years ago

Neither C# nor JavaScript provide guaranteed tail-call optimization. The sine qua non of functional programming is using recursion instead of iteration, therefore without TCO you can't actually program in a rigorously functional manner (whether pure or impure).

When people discuss "functional programming" they're typically discussing high-level, idiomatic functional interfaces like map-filter-reduce. Though without TCO implementing those interfaces often requires some internal ugliness, and without first-class functions and lexical closures they won't compose as well.

TL;DR: Sprinkle the identifiers "map", "filter", and "reduce" in your code and it'll magically become functional-oriented as far as most people are concerned. But if you really want to begin to think in a functional mindset, rewrite your program structure to use recursion instead of iteration. When you do that for non-trivial code you'll naturally discover and appreciate all the other functional-oriented approaches, like first-class functions, closures, currying, etc, even without being told the formal names of those concepts; and increasingly use functional- rather OOP-based data encapsulation, which in turn makes it more obvious how and why to minimize data mutation in favor of pure functions. FWIW, JavaScript supports many of these concepts quite well, but because of the TCO limitation they're applied rather inconsistently and not always in the best way.

danielpernik• 8 years ago

WTF does it mean you are limited to Java? Java 8+ has pretty cool stuff around FP.

wilsonnb3• 8 years ago

Absolutely not. Thinking that you might have to learn functional programming to get a decent job is a clear indicator that you are in a Hacker News/Silicon Valley bubble.

The world will run on object oriented and imperative programming for the foreseeable future. Functional programming is more or less a novelty professionally, although a highly visible one in certain circles.

rhwk97• 8 years ago

I find the functional programming crowd can be very vocal on a site like HN...can't tell you how many times I thought..."you know, I should really learn Lisp" after visiting here!

yesenadam3• 8 years ago

Hehe. I started learning Prolog a few weeks ago - not sure why. Maybe after seeing one more story about it on here, and seeing it on lists of languages that're good to learn. But didn't know anything much at all....

What a surprise. I really like it. It's really sooo different from any other language I've tried (C, C++, Python, JS, SmallTalk, Lisp, bash, AWK etc etc) - Most programming consists of telling the computer how to go about doing something. None of that in Prolog. You 'just' describe how the solution will look.[0] And secondly, it's unexpectedly Functional - it's impossible to change variable values, or iterate.[1] Recursion only. 'Data' is same form as 'program', the program can change the data/program while running etc. And even Lispier than Lisp in some ways.

I think I'll be regularly using it in an AWK-like way - and already have been - quickly writing programs of a couple of dozen lines or less to do things that would take longer to do otherwise. And there's something cute about it that AWK has too, maybe it's that it does well in its own unique world. Just starting that book on how Erlang was 'grown' using Prolog...

I don't know why I wrote this. Prolog was just surprisingly FPish, and if I hadn't learnt about that stuff, I wouldn't have recognized it, or appreciated it.

[0] Really, you need a new vocabulary to describe what it's doing. [1] Ok, not impossible.

veddox• 8 years ago

Hardly a novelty, it's been around longer than object-oriented programming has. But apart from that, you are correct to state that it is a minority paradigm on the general job market.

SamReidHughes• 8 years ago

Depends on whether you mean functional programming in the small or in the large. Using map, filter, tail recursion, etc, is child's play. Being explicit about how your data moves about there system is forced by FP and is what makes your programs better.

probinso• 8 years ago

No. You need to learn Three languages, and at least one of them well. Preferably these languages hit different paradigms. That is my minimum requirement for a junior developer.

mbrodersen• 8 years ago

Functional programming is just another tool in your tool box. Worth learning the same way OO is worth learning.

Do I have to learn Functional Programming to get a decent developer job?

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