The promises of Functional Programming

The promises of Functional Programming

I’m a computer science enthusiastic and I love the idea that a programming language can be specifically designed to fit all the needs for computer science to advance faster.

However I am still very sceptic about functional programming.

While it certainly makes some good points about the use of recursion and the extra feature of not needing the locks for parallelism and so on, I don’t think is such a great feature. Rather I would consider it a miss from part of the creators or some trick to avoid data corruption. I mean it certainly works and in practice makes it much easier to avoid data corruption.

But I would argue the next analogy to explain my point of view on the matter.

Imagine a highway, on which there will be thousands of high speed vehicles travelling at all times.

I would argue that the feature functional programming provides of not needing to worry about data corruption, because you cannot write data would be like building this hypothetical highway with multiple levels each specially designed for each vehicle.

Each thread running on their own highway uninterrupted and undisturbed because there is no way of interacting with one another.

I see this as cheating cause the whole point of having parallel programming is to execute a little part of a big task while other thread executes other little part of the task.

I believe the perfect parallel program should be able to time perfectly how much to “slow down” a thread without necessarily freezing it completely in order for it to miss another threads writing or reading or processing of data.

Instead of making a safer highway, the drivers should become better so the highway remains the same but the drivers are so smart, advanced and well trained that the same level of efficiency can be achieved while having the feature of sharing information.