Ask HN: Are functional programmers more upset about how good AI is at coding?

aamichail about 8 hours ago 14 comments

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One might expect this since functional programmers pride themselves on the elegance of their code while programmers using hybrid languages just want to get the code working — elegance of the implementation is not that important to them.

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fwlr•about 2 hours ago

“Upset” is not quite the right word - something more like “skeptical”, maybe? It does seem like AI programming tends to create the kind of problems that tend to push programmers toward functional programming.

mbac32768•32 minutes ago

Yes some of us are having a hard time with it.

All of the years we've spent on immutable by default, strong types and dreaming about the lambda has to matter! The AI that just rips out thousands of lines an hour of imperative and weakly typed code just has to be leading organizations to ruin! You'll see!

We worked hard at honing our craft. It's still meaningful, damnit!

markfsharp•about 8 hours ago

I think the premise is mostly wrong, and it confuses functional programming with aesthetic programming.

amichail•about 8 hours ago

Don't functional programmers want to make programming more difficult so that writing routine apps becomes more of an intellectual challenge and elegance of the code is a major part of that?

coldtea•about 8 hours ago

No. I mean, this framing is not even wrong, it's merely absurd.

amichail•about 7 hours ago

Maybe that's what most programmers using hybrid languages are secretly thinking.

moomoo11•about 7 hours ago

no. if we use that framing of yours, fp aim is to write a solution that flows like a river while imperative solution is like rolling up a ball of various solutions and then throwing it at the problem.

amichail•about 7 hours ago

The point is the details of the implementation don't matter that much anymore. It's just something for the AI to work out — much like assembly code generation is for compilers.

austin-cheney•about 3 hours ago

The topic paragraph and comments indicate you already have your own conclusion to this question. If you already have an answer to your own question then why ask in the first place? This sounds like cognitive conservatism in search of support.

Shashiwatchdog•about 7 hours ago

I don't think functional programmers are necessarily more upset about AI being good at coding. If anything, FP tends to emphasize concepts that AI is already quite good at manipulating: composability, immutability, pure functions, and well-defined abstractions.

amichail•about 7 hours ago

If AI is already good at this, then it will naturally lead programmers who may not be good in that respect in that direction anyway via the code that it generates.

In other words, being a human expert in writing high quality implementations is less important now.

dcminter•about 8 hours ago

> since functional programmers pride themselves on the elegance of their code while programmers using hybrid languages just want to get the code working

Says who?

beanjuiceII•about 8 hours ago

no not at all,AI works extremely well with this mode

amichail•about 8 hours ago

That's not what I asked.