Wow, people take the FP winter quote way out of context. I didn't say FP heat death is coming.
Historically the AI winter lead to a machine learning boom twenty years later. It just took a while for spring to come back. 🌺
Historically the AI winter lead to a machine learning boom twenty years later. It just took a while for spring to come back. 🌺
There is a natural ebb and flow to innovation and progress in our discipline. And good ideas genuinely take many decades to progress to adoption.
Typed functional programming is a still an amazing idea, it just may be in a for a bit of lull in progress while new ideas flower.
Typed functional programming is a still an amazing idea, it just may be in a for a bit of lull in progress while new ideas flower.
There are a lot of great ideas in FP that are still in the "just off the paper" kind of stage that are going to be bloom in like 10-12 years. Think of all the amazing work in Idris2, OCaml Effect Handlers, Lean4 etc that's still kind of finding applications.
Ideas like this are like GC was in early Lisps. It wasn't until Java that these ideas kind of entered the mainstream 30 years later that they saw mass adoption and acceptance.
There's no denying that in 2010-2020 the areas where FP applied were limited to a smattering of sectors, that debatably, most didn't really pay dividends to either developer productivity or product quality. As evidenced by the fact that we don't have a lot of success stories.
Now you can say that's due to language, or philosophy, or community, or economics. Causality is a tricky thing to determine in large scale human systems. I don't think statements like that are knowable tbh and pontificating about them mostly just reveals your own biases.
From what I've seen, purely in terms of economics is that a lot of the sectors in traditional industries where FP was are due for a correction in 2021 and I think a lot of the "fat" that traditionally bled back into development is going to get trimmed.
As for the "new money", a lot of is coming from crypto and that's not a real industry in any meaningful sense. It's a speculative bubble, and bubbles are not sustainable. They suck in money from fools and then pop, leaving a wake of destruction, job loss, and broken tech.
So that's what my prediction meant. Winters aren't necessarily a bad thing, so long as you can prepare, and aren't left out in the cold.
If you're just graduating from university, don't put all your eggs in the FP basket. Diversify your skills and learn broadly.
/fin
If you're just graduating from university, don't put all your eggs in the FP basket. Diversify your skills and learn broadly.
/fin
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