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How useful are functional programming languages? (mander.xyz)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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I hear they are good, make it easier to maintain code-bases. Most often I reach for python to get the job done. Does anyone have experiences with functional languages for larger projects?

In particular I am interested to learn more on how to handle databases, and writing to them and what patterns they come up with. Is a database handle you can write to not ... basically mutable state, the arch-nemesis of functional languages?

Are functional languages only useful with an imperative shell?

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[–] [S] 1 point 9 months ago (4 children)

Are there entire operating systems written in a functional language? Why is it imperative languages like C?

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    Functional languages are inherently built on non-functional ones, for the same reason that object oriented languages are built on non object oriented ones, because cpus are fundamentally not object oriented or functional.

    They are computational machines with specific instructions around moving values in memory and performing certain operations on them.

    Assembly / machine code is always, at a fundamental level, procedural programming because at a the most fundamental level, cpus are designed as procedural machines, so all higher ordered languages, from C, all the way up through Python and Lisp, have to translate down to assembly, which maps to the machine's instruction set, which is procedural and imperative.

    However, there is an OS that tries to be functional as much as possible though, and that's a Linux distribution called NixOS, based on the functional language Nix.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    There can be, although some parts may still need to be written in assembly (which is imperative, because that's ultimately what most CPUs do), for parts like a kernel's context switching logic. But C has similar restrictions, like how it is impossible to start a C function without initializing the stack. Exception: some CPUs (eg Cortex M) have a specialized mechanism to initialize the stack.

    As for why C, it's a low-level language that maps well to most CPU's native assembly language. If instead we had stack-based CPUs -- eg Lisp Machines or a real Java Machine -- then we'd probably be using other languages to write an OS for those systems.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago

    A few good reasons, the first being that brand new operating systems don't get written all that often. But even if they were, functional languages focus a lot on abstractions, making them generally higher level languages and so not fast enough to compete with C.

    Having said that, Rust's design is quite inspired by functional languages in many ways, and it is indeed being used in operating systems.

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