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gwern comments on Course recommendations for Friendliness researchers - Less Wrong Discussion

62 Post author: Louie 09 January 2013 02:33PM

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Comment author: OrphanWilde 09 January 2013 06:00:51PM *  -1 points [-]

Functional-style programming doesn't make it any more natural, it just forbids you from doing things any other way. I spend most of my time when dealing with functional-style programming (primarily in XSLT) trying to figure out ways around the constraints imposed by the language rather than actually solving the problem I'm working on.

In XSLT I once copied a chunk of code 8 times, replacing its recursive function calls with its own code, because it was blowing up the stack; and it's not like I could use mutable variables and skip the recursion, it was literally the only implementation possible. And it had to call itself in multiple places of its own code; it couldn't be phrased in a tail-recursion friendly fashion. Meaning that for that code, no functional language could have resolved the stack explosion issue. -That's- functional programming to me; dysfunctional.

[ETA: Apparently there is a pattern which would overcome the tail stack issue, and compilers exist which can take advantage of it, so my statement that "No functional language could have resolved the stack explosion issue" was false.]

Comment author: gwern 09 January 2013 06:11:53PM *  0 points [-]

In XSLT...That's functional programming to me; dysfunctional.

I think I see the problem here.

Perlis comes to mind:

Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.