Three Pots (of Knowledge)

Two Worlds / Three Ideas

World 1: Lisp Languages
- like Racket
World 2: ML Languages
- like Haskell, F#
All functional programming languages decend from one or the other.
Big Idea: Pure Computation / Immutability
- ML: Types (important concept in Haskell/Ocaml/F#)
- List: Macros (Syntactic Transformation)
- ML's style is more common

Despite being the origin of many important concepts
Lisp: First Garbage Collection
- Now in every language
Technology and concepts from FP often adopted in other languages
- These ideas are adopted with only partial understanding

We should not be satisfied at current level
Applied FP concepts often "Lipstick on a Pig"
FP is good for general purposes
- Current limitations are bad and unnecessary
- (Limitations in applicable areas of use)
(Unfortunately) little to no evidence that FP is good or better than imperative
- Only way to prove FP is good is SCALE
- Impelment on a large scale
- Not just a couple large systems, but common commercial use on a large scale
People cannot evaluate what the do not understand

Popularity does not equal Quality
GADTs are good for optimization
- note: I think this bullet is out of place
Be understanding of other programming environments
Use the right tools for the right job
- Mistake 1: "We need lots of tools for lots of systems"
- You do not need so many tools.
- Google limits to 4 languages
  - C++, Java, Python, Go
When you (the engineer) pick tech or tools, think what that means for your organization

Minority language means poor or small set of tools / libraries
- Using a language is a contract to improve it
If you depend on a technology, you MUST contribute back
Minority languages tend to have small but skilled set of programmers
Incremental and reactive programming
- Iacademic perspective is valuable

Teach kids programming
- With text adventures!
  - (Side note: Yaron Minsky shared an example of this on twitter)
Your involvement in Programming means you should care about its education

Minsky thinks monorepos are very good
- Unfortunately, OPAM doesn't work well wtih monorepos
To switch a massive organization's main language / structure
- Don't, and start your own company
- Personalyl undertake the impossible task of making the switch
  - (Basically impossible)