I guess if FP'ers didn't think it was better, we wouldn't be doing it. It's not like there are lots of people stuck in functional programming jobs wishing they could be writing Java.
"All" FP articles and "always" is probably broader a generalization than what you really mean. Can you share examples from the linked page that you see as smug?
This can also easily be a filter on the part of the reader: anything FP is always close to triggering the "smug" concept, even if they don't use words that would be read as smug if the topic was something else.
Same way some people are quick to read intelligent women as "uppity" though they say nothing that would be read as uppity if said by someone else.
I don't usually (get to) talk much in our team meetings. This one time I suggested we try FP for a new internal project - and the backlash I got was quite unexpected. Merely the mention made my teammates launch into a dozen different assumptions, before I even finished the sentence. I was shut down pretty quickly. I was surprised, because usually they are at least receptive to hearing out new ideas.
I think outside of HN, there's a large chunk of people out there who just have this prejudice about FP. I am only about 10 years into the software industry and I feel like I'm missing some history that is not recorded anywhere, but lives as a tribal memory.
I will agree it's about 30% less code on average, but whether it's "team friendly" or "debug friendly" is quite another matter. Debates over such often rage for months.
If it's truly superior, then form a company called Functional Magic or the like and out-compete OOP rivals and eat their lunch. Proof will then be in the pudding, no more talk. (Some co's have tried similar without long-term success, at least outside of niches, as it does well in finance.)
If FP is say 15% more productive, such a company would eventually just outcompete OOers by growing 15% a year. Even 5% a year would catch up in roughly a decade. If you truly believe in FP's superiority, do it! Unleash the FP Kraken! When you are golfing with Warren Buffett & Gates, you can say, "I toldja so, fore!..."
"more productive" is not a singular metric. What indefinite 15% year over year growth in mainstream tech requires is (in addition to favorable market conditions) the ability to get useful work out of huge numbers of very inexperienced people.
Clearly Scheme, for instance, cannot do this better than Java. But this tells you next to nothing about which tool is more productive in the hands of a small team of people who know what they're doing.
> But this tells you next to nothing about which tool is more productive in the hands of a small team of people who know what they're doing.
This has been tried, usually driven by academics who try to start a business by hiring "elite" coders with the belief that you need many fewer elites to do the same work as "normal" coders. Sometimes they have short-term "hits", but it's usually not a sustainable business model. For one, it takes coders with some business sense and team skills, something the academic type tend to lack: they are idealists who get snagged up on arcane design philosophies. Imagine a room of Sheldon Coopers. I'm just the messenger.
