Functional Programming Is Hard, That's Why It's Good
This is the lie that every functional programmer has perpetuated for the last 50 years since the dawn of Lisp - that somehow, automagically, productivity or effectiveness of programmers increase with the use of functional languages.<p>It's the biggest lie in the programming world, and it was designed to make the uber-geeks of this world, those people that you walk around the block just to avoid saying hello to   because you know they are deeply and profoundly anti-social, feel good about themselves, to feel special, as though they have the "upper hand" that other normal people who deliberately choose other languages over purely functional ones.<p>There is value in learning how to think recursively, but a lot of programming, especially systems programming doesn't need to have its for loops transformed into recursive functions, or its addition operators into primitive recursive functions.<p>I am sick and tired of people expounding on the alleged efficacy and efficiency of functional languages and I wish they would just STFU once and for all and go back to their porn intermezzos between their functional programming spurts.