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Comment Re:But not as much (Score 0) 472

I think the reason is the Perl community evolved out of multiple other communities who each brought with them distinctive styles. You had the shell people (system admins). You had the Sed/Awk people. You had C people. You had LISP people. Then starting with Perl 4 you picked up HTML/CSS people. Then you had the influence of early version of Javascript and VBScript. Finally starting with Perl5 you had the migration of C++/Java people. Perl allowed them all to keep writing the way they liked.

Comment Re:It has its uses (Score 0) 418

foldl in Erlang is tail recursive automatically. foldr is not by default tail recursive in Erlang, Though I should mention foldr is tail recursive in languages like Haskell, and there are implementations of foldr in terms of foldl and visa versa. The conversions between foldr & foldl (depending on which is tail recursive) make explicit what needs to be done to move from non-tail recursive to tail recursive for recursions. Yet another reason you want to use those.

And as for can't follow. Your claim was about the messiness that these imperative artifacts remained and were worse. To avoid the messiness, you have to use the looping structures of functional programming Doing functional programming imperatively, of course is going to be messy. Doing functional programming functionally and you get the benefits.

Comment Re:It has its uses (Score 0) 418

OK I gotcha. It is shockingly easy in lazy code to write algorithms that are quadratic in memory. Arguably that's one of the big advantages of using standard morphisms and not recursions.

I also agree it is often (very often) easier to write an explicit recursion; and only then if you have to create a morphism structure. That's a different claim though than with loops. Once the algorithm is written as a loop you have all the pieces for a standard design pattern using morphisms. Which was my point to grandparent. The classification of all possible recursions is coming along nicely but we still have about 50 types of morphisms that (at least in theory) can show up. In practice hylomorphism covers most cases for recursions, and how to do this can be non-obvious. But hylomorphism covers all cases, with simple transformations of for-loops. Having written a for-loop you have the structure you need to do the morphism transformation, its the same work. My point above was about the easy case, not the hard case of general recursion you are talking about.

As an aside, I believe (not an expert) the condition for a graph traversal to be hylomorphic is that the operations follow the distributive law. Assuming I'm right on this, that's not a whole lot of math you just check your operation and apply one of the standard graph traversals.

Comment Re:It has its uses (Score 0) 418

Here we disagree. I think the general way you program that sort of thing is via. a fold. I don't know Erlang but it has the classic folds:

foldl(Fun, Acc0, List) -> Acc1
foldr(Fun, Acc0, List) -> Acc1
Fun = fun((Elem :: T, AccIn) -> AccOut)
Acc0 = Acc1 = AccIn = AccOut = term()
List = [T]
T = term()

foldl is the preferred one for Erlang

Comment Re:It has its uses (Score 1) 418

I'm going to argue there are no special cases that don't fit.

Basically
the set of all possible for loops (no side effects) \subset the set of all possible hylomorphisms (generalizations of map reduce) \subset of all possible recursions.

That's why I wanted to see a real example, because of mathematically they can't exist.

As for accumulators over loops those can be usually handled via. a fold providing the reduction operation is associative. The initial and final state never present a problem.

___

I'll agree I was considering lazy part of functional. At this point I think purity allows for laziness and laziness demonstrates a lot of the advantages of purity. Otherwise you are backed to mixed paradigm which I dealt with other places in this thread. As for lazy with large amounts of data, Hadoop is lazy. So I'm not sure what you are saying.

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