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The creator of LINQ, Erik Meijer, wrote a fun article "The curse of the excluded middle: Mostly functional programming does not work". Yes it's tongue-in-cheek and highly provocative, but many of his points are true. There is a lot more yet to be learned from functional programming than LINQ and switch expressions.

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=2611829




This is such a weird article. All of his examples are insane strawman non-idomatic C# code, and then he complains when they don't do whatever he decides "an average programmer" would expect them to do. Huh? They were all either doing exactly what I expected them to do (silly things), or were so strange and alien that even Visual Studio has no idea what to do with them! I've never seen anything like that Cell<T> example and it doesn't come close to compiling. What a weird, weird thing to do: write code that literally does not compile and then complain about it!?


Is it meant to be tongue and cheek? I personally didn’t get that impression. I assumed he was using the non-religious meaning of “fundamentalist”: strict and literal adherence to a set of principles.


I mean it has a deliberately highly-provocative style. But the points he raises are all completely valid.




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