Curry On!
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2015–2024
44:43 · 25K views · Aug 6, 2015
Ron Pressler's Curry On 2015 talk arguing that imperative languages should not be polluted with pure functional concepts like monads. He favors simple blocking code over non-blocking styles.
Recommended as the case for blocking code and virtual threads over monads and async/await.
4 comments from Hacker News
> Or Java? Yes - that was implied in the same sentence where I wrote "(e.g. exceptions or actual compiler enforced error handling like Rust)." :-) > As far as I know, race conditions happen and leak out into production with Scala and Java. They do. But there are more techniques in those languages (such as immutable collections, as their type systems are actually able to model and implement them) to mitigate the issue. > and really the lesson of programming in the large for the past 30 years, is that it's not enough to have mathematical or methodological power in guaranteeing correctness in a program. I agree there. I actually don't abide by the ideas that using a language like Haskell or Idris or what have you will automagically grant you superior or error-free software. I actually like what talks like these have to say: * [LINK] * this video However, that does not mean we disregard established practices, only to try to reinvent them in a bad way as we see golang trying to do (no generics - even though many other languages implemented them "correctly", bad error handling, no sum types, null pointers, and so on). They purposely disregarded these works without good arguments at all, and now they're struggling to find workarounds, or continue to dismiss them as non-issues, even though they clearly are. The way I see it, the moment Java gets fibers and value types implemented, and GraalVM's native compilation is mature enough for use, golang's appeal as a devops langauge where it en
That's a fair point overall. It's basically the entirety of the debate between functional languages and imperative languages. Nonetheless, it is still pretty good question as far as someone trying to understand the differences and why it might be useful. @hmehta, one of my recent favorite videos generally on this topic has been from Curry On conference [1]. It's not strictly data-flow vs control flow, but it does discuss some of the more practical differences in between using monads for structuring data flows vs imperative control. My take is that monads can be roughly considered as wrapping up imperative control flow along with the data. E.g. wrapping up the if/else choices into a data structure. Currently I actually found studying up on actual category theory easier than all the "easy introduction" things regarding monads. As in, the ideas when presented straightforwardly and technically correct are simpler than we give credence to. [1]: this video
Here are more arguments against async/await: this video Ron Pressler always was an advocate for blocking code and even joined oracle to add virtual threads to the JVM, thus invalidating the performance argument of the async/await/non-blocking crowd. I really wish young developers would be taught about the actor model and communicating sequential processes before falling for the false promises of async/await-land. And I wish JavaScript runtimes had a way of expressing continuations /blocking threads on their eventloop.
Does it shake out to any real advantage? To put it shortly: Writing single-threaded blocking code is far easier for most people and has many other benefits, like more understandable and readable programs: this video The main reason why non-blocking IO with it's style of intertwining concurrency and algorithms came along is that starting a thread for every request was too expensive. With virtual threads that problem is eliminated so we can go back to writing blocking code.