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Ask HN: Are functional programmers more upset about how good AI is at coding?

by amichail·7d ago·16 comments·view on hn ↗

One might expect this since functional programmers pride themselves on the elegance of their code while programmers using hybrid languages just want to get the code working — elegance of the implementation is not that important to them.

16 comments

The topic paragraph and comments indicate you already have your own conclusion to this question. If you already have an answer to your own question then why ask in the first place? This sounds like cognitive conservatism in search of support.

I think the premise is mostly wrong, and it confuses functional programming with aesthetic programming.

I don't think functional programmers are necessarily more upset about AI being good at coding. If anything, FP tends to emphasize concepts that AI is already quite good at manipulating: composability, immutability, pure functions, and well-defined abstractions.

If AI is already good at this, then it will naturally lead programmers who may not be good in that respect in that direction anyway via the code that it generates.

In other words, being a human expert in writing high quality implementations is less important now.

“Upset” is not quite the right word - something more like “skeptical”, maybe? It does seem like AI programming tends to create the kind of problems that tend to push programmers toward functional programming.

> since functional programmers pride themselves on the elegance of their code while programmers using hybrid languages just want to get the code working

Says who?

Your premise is not matching my experience at all.

I know Haskell but use C++ as my daily tool. And I do care deeply about code quality because I don't want to spend most of my time fixing bugs.

no not at all,AI works extremely well with this mode

That's not what I asked.

Yes some of us are having a hard time with it.

All of the years we've spent on immutable by default, strong types and dreaming about the lambda has to matter! The AI that just rips out thousands of lines an hour of imperative and weakly typed code just has to be leading organizations to ruin! You'll see!

We worked hard at honing our craft. It's still meaningful, damnit!

Author is confused.

FP is disgusting looking anyway

Once React came out with shit like

    useEffect(() => {}, [])

And it was actually good and useful, I gave up on code aesthetics. Or rather, moved that thinking into overall comment, spacing, file breakdown and organization.

How the fuck does "useEffect(() => {}, [])" mean a function that will run when the page loads? And then if you do this

    useEffect(handleComponentMount, [])

You go to jail in real life. Nobody knows why - it has to be an arrow function.