We don’t know anything about programming!

Moore’s Law has hit a limit with processing power on single processor peaking and computing systems shipping with multiple cores. Functional programming is the hot new topic in industries dealing with massive scale in date or internet scale loads. Functional programming is better suited to handling side effects of concurrency and distributed computing when compared to Imperative programming models. The lack of adequate supports on the tools programming particularly in debugging and testing have slowed the advance of functional programming and its widely anticipated growth. However, I find that the bigger challenge is the developers struggling to come to grips with the functional programming paradigms. Most programs written in functional languages (at least initially) seem to be clones of their Imperative cousins. Perhaps the fault lies in the indoctrination of the programming community about a particular way of programming (in this case Imperative) as the Universal truth. I came across this great video about the Future of Programming by Bret Victor. 

In his inimitable style he introduces hot paradigms today i.e. Dynamic Programming, Functional Programming (Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style), Actor Model (embodied in Erlang, Akka), Massively Parallel Programming Array (FPGA). It does open your eyes to how many of these ‘hot’ paradigms have been around for so long. But the most compelling part of the talk was the last bit where he advocates keeping an open mind [1]“It's good to learn how to do something. It's better to learn many ways of doing something. But it's best to learn all these ways as suggestions or hints, not truth.” [2] “Learn tools, and use tools, but don't accept tools. Always distrust them; always be alert for alternative ways of thinking.” [3]“I don't know how to make a machine that builds a person out of a cell. But I think the problem is that we've been stuck for too long diddling with our details. We've been sitting here worrying about our type system, when we should be worrying about how to get flexible machines and flexible programming.”

Like Bret says – ‘do not be ignorant, but we need to be aware of the limitations and strengths of different programming paradigms, and be willing to explore flexible approaches to programming and not get stuck too long diddling with the details’