Make It Something Functional

Functional is good now. As an industry, we’re bullish on “functional”.

Hey, functions. I know what those are. Let’s do those.

But we’re in no ways immune to the general anti-intellectual slant of the wider culture. It’s disappointing and somewhat shocking to see the vituperation used to defend emotive responses and confusedly-founded approaches in the face of something that might be nearly the same thing, but with firmer and more thought-through and already explored mathematical / computer-scientific grounding.

If you want a flavor of this, just go look back a ways to discussion of promises/futures in JavaScript. It’s tangential to my daily work, so I had the guilty luxury of skimming across it and bouncing out when it got ugly. But I recall (and have no references in my quiver, so happy hunting if you really want to read them for yourself) some ugly, ugly exchanges in long, tedious GitHub threads of insidious intent.

So as we dilute “functional” till it becomes a homeopathic solution throughout the industry,