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I think you nailed it. But FP proponents have done a fair bit of harm to the paradigm itself in that some of the more osutspoken proponents have been pretty alienating. They've pushed the language superiority argument to death. They should probably be focused on pushing the style in the hopes that the next round of popular languages begins to implement FP style as first class features. Which is of course what the author alludes to and I think is actually happening. Which would jive with history.

A lot of what became OO language features arose because people were already using the style in non-OO languages. C being a great example of how you can use a ton of C++ like features, you best end up writing a lot of boiler plate to hook up function pointers and the like.

Going back further we see features in C were being implemented by assembly prigrammers as macro assembly. So the pattern the author puts forward has basically held true for multiple shifts in programming paradigms.

Which leaves me with one point of contention with the presenter. That OO dominance is not happenstance. And neither was the fact that lots of people were writing OO style C. There is something about OOP that helped people think about their code easier. That's why they adopted the features. Maybe not everything about it was great and we're learning that. But it genuinely helped people. Just as English language oriented languages helped people over ASM.




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