this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Functional Programming
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I have written a bunch of Clojure in previous positions. But it has undergone the same fate that almost all functional code bases I have knowledge of (in corporate product settings): Colleagues have hard times getting into the functional mindset, and it becomes hard to maintain. Over the years it gets replaced with some more pragmatic hybrid- og OO language.
I have seen the same with projects written in Haskell, Erlang, and Elixir.
It's all a really nice idea, but in practical reality it runs into issues with "social scaling"
EDIT: Realizing this was not super helpful. If you want to look for positions where fp can be employed I think something academia related, or a startup where there is greater technical flexibility is something to look for
What do you think is the secret sauce that lets companies like Jane Street have a 99% ocaml codebase even with 2000 or so employees?
Not sure. But I think starting out early in the growth fase of the company and having a strong core of senior enginnees that can push for it and ensures everyone learns good practices
The company I work for is much smaller but we’ve still grown a lot with a nearly 100% Haskell codebase (on the backend at least). For us, the main thing has been setting expectations and doing a lot of upfront training and mentoring. We hire people who don’t know Haskell or who have never done FP and put them through training. We have a lot of mentoring ongoing afterwards.
Not OP, but on the contrary, I think your remark about social scaling of FP code bases was very insightful!