It's not really saying "only expert programmers" though, is it? It's people who know Haskell, which by coincidence happens to be overzealous undergraduates and a certain subset of experienced programmers. FP is a paradigm among many, its basics somewhat predate (or since it's so close, co-date?) more imperative descriptions of computation. That we mostly use and as such mostly teach beginners with procedural languages is a quirk of history. Nothing would prevent a change to that except historical inertia. Saying "more people should learn Haskell" is saying "I don't want to write code only for other expert programmers." It's just as natural if you know it, and even beginners could know it, they just don't.

However as I mentioned, since it is not true that most people can read FP code, I mostly avoid using it. The example comes from my solution to AoC2023's Day 3, "Gear Ratios", which is just about the only thing I use Haskell for.

That doesn't mean that using it doesn't have practical applications, since being used to multiple paradigms opens you up to unconventional solutions. I've recently sped up a MATLAB function ~100x through using a more functional style to manipulate memory more efficiently. Async/await, certain styles of modern iterator manipulation and generators escaped F#, CLU and others into C# and from there into the world at large specifically because Microsoft programmers saw a problem they had had a solution for in previous functional projects. So it's not all useless.

For the record, a more imperative version could be written as

    symbols = [ imagine there's stuff here ]
    gears = []

    for (symbol, coord) in symbols:
        if symbol == '*':
            ns = neighbouringNumbers(coord) 
            if len(ns) == 2:
                gears.append(ns)

or in Python's functional-inspired notation which directly mirrors what's happening in the Haskell code

    gears = [ neighbouringNumbers(coord) 
              for symbol,coord in symbols
              if symbol == '*' and len(neighbouringNumbers(coord)) == 2 ]

though that requires an unnecessary extra call to neighbouringNumbers, which you could solve with a walrus op but I can't remember how to do that. I also changed the entire pair being passed to neighbouringNumbers (which was convenient in Haskell) to only the coordinate that is required (which is convenient in Python).

Personally I just find nowadays that having to comprehend "it collects neighbour-pairs from '*' symbols" from the imperative code harder than having that be the thing that is actually written down.

user:	kamray23
created:	June 16, 2021
karma:	334