QOTW: “Row Farmers & Stateful Sinners”
October 18, 2010 -The second YOW talk Dave Thomas delivered back on the 30th September was entitled “Why Real Developers Embrace Functional Programming and NoSQL: Data Confessions of an Object’holic and Stateful Sinner”. Needless to say, it contained a fair bit of controversial content that Dave was fairly unapologetic about, including the bold pronouncement that ‘C# and Java will be legacy platforms in 5 years’.
The gist of the argument was:
- Objects are not terribly good abstractions for most real-world problems.
- Good object-oriented design is hard, and Morts are still the bread & butter coders out there producing software.
- Objects are implemented inefficiently in almost all runtime environments — “A good JIT can generate fast code, but it will generate a lot of it”. They also don’t translate well to parallel execution environments.
- Serialisation/storage is still a problem — sending objects over the wire, or persisting to disk requires complicated, framework-heavy mapping.
- KLOCs kill!
Dave’s proposed solution is a wholesale movement towards Functional Programming. This has been contemplated before (ie for the last forty years), but I think there’s more appetite in mainstream development communities today. Functional languages are available for both the Java & .NET runtimes (and have been for some time), but more importantly we’re seeing some FP paradigms pop up in imperative languages — eg Ruby, Python and even Linq in C#. I suspect the future will be much more heavily skewed towards multi-paradigm languages than Dave would prefer, but I can certainly see it happening.
So, count me in as a convert. I’m foolishly attempting to teach myself Haskell by following the excellent wikibook and building toy web apps with Happstack — expect to see some more posts on this subject soon as I muddle my way through.