> By the way this problem is not unique for FP, OOP suffered the same problem in the past. But the OOP community learned from its mistakes and now most developers know to 'prefer composition over inheritance', for instance.
This is a great point. I think there are a lot of open questions about basic questions such as how ergonomic effect systems can become and which functional programming abstractions become intuitive through enough practice versus always feeling confusing. I think that stuff will shake out in a decade or two, and we will end up with much better styles to choose from. Who wants to program in 1990s/early 2000s Java style anymore? (Well, okay, a lot of people, but ignore them.) Nobody would judge OOP negatively based on that mess, because we know it can be done a lot better, and languages have evolved to cater to what we've learned. I think functional programming has a lot of evolution to come that will make it more ergonomic and more practical. It will be especially interesting to see what the cohort of programmers introduced to functional programming via modern front-end Javascript will do as some of them transition to the back end and look for statically typed languages that are better than Typescript.
This is a great point. I think there are a lot of open questions about basic questions such as how ergonomic effect systems can become and which functional programming abstractions become intuitive through enough practice versus always feeling confusing. I think that stuff will shake out in a decade or two, and we will end up with much better styles to choose from. Who wants to program in 1990s/early 2000s Java style anymore? (Well, okay, a lot of people, but ignore them.) Nobody would judge OOP negatively based on that mess, because we know it can be done a lot better, and languages have evolved to cater to what we've learned. I think functional programming has a lot of evolution to come that will make it more ergonomic and more practical. It will be especially interesting to see what the cohort of programmers introduced to functional programming via modern front-end Javascript will do as some of them transition to the back end and look for statically typed languages that are better than Typescript.