The Functional Programming Apologist

There do exist legitimate criticisms of functional programming (FP) concepts, just as there are reasonable criticisms of imperative style, procedural style, prolog-esk logic/constraint programming, and even our precious object-orientation. Still, as you might expect, the vast majority of the tomatoes hurled in the general direction of the FP community are totally absurd. Here are a couple actual comments from various blogs. I am not giving the sources for obvious reasons, but you could probably find them in Google.

Imperative languages represent the straight line from point A to point B. They reflect the true nature of the beast. If you had to slay a dragon, would you try to convince another dragon to fight for you, or would you grab a damn weapon?

Yes, as a matter of fact, I WOULD get another dragon to fight for me. It's called abstraction! This is why we have programming languages in the first place, even though machine code "reflects the true nature of the beast". Does your CPU know what object orientation is? Unless you do all your structure and flow control using GOTO, you are NOT reflecting the true nature of your beloved beast. Sorry to break the news.

Here's another real gem. I see this sort of thing all the time.

Closures in today's world are a "language geek" feature. Unless done extremely carefully and in a way that supports the various skill levels of developers, they end up being unusable and unsupportable by anything less than computer language savants. In their inherent obscurity and complexity, "language geek" style closures are about as anti-Java as you can get.

First off thanks for calling me a geek, I really didn't get enough of that growing up interested in computers. Imagine a time when Java didn't have generics. In other words, imagine Java 1 through 4. Java 5 generics evolved from the type classes in Haskell — a fringe fancy-pants FP academic language if there ever was one. Some people (possibly the same ones) were saying:

Generics in today's world are a "language geek" feature. Unless done extremely carefully and in a way that supports the various skill levels of developers, they end up being unusable and unsupportable by anything less than computer language savants. In their inherent obscurity and complexity, "language geek" style generics are about as anti-Java as you can get.

I think I've made my point.

But wait! Maybe I've been wrong all these years! Maybe generics and even anonymous inner classes are perfect additions to Java, but closures would be stepping way over the line. After all, they are an FP concept and Java is OO. That's like the Hatfields and the McCoys and the two would never mix. Could that really be the case?

Let's see what James Gosling, the inventer of Java, said about it just yesterday:

There has been a lot of chatter about the closures proposal penned by Neal Gafter. And, in particular, whether or not I support it. I absolutely do. Java feels alive, not stuck in some chisel marks on stone tablets. Closures were left out of Java initially more because of time pressures than anything else. Closures, as a concept, are tried and true - well past the days of being PhD topics.

And don't even ask me what Guy Steele would say about it!