phizy

You can do better, then. Read nendroids latest reply to me, and help them understand that it's the "use of statements" that makes a language imperative, not the "modification of state."

I won't be responding, and they seem to think they're quite the expert in this sort of thing.

That is absurd. You could work yourself to death scrubbing dishes and it will never match the returns of inheriting a fortune from your parents. You do not live in a world where wealth is meritocratically distributed.

What's the difference? Let me quote them directly:

"Oh, you're one of THOSE people." (What people?)

"Trump is not being impeached." (Simple to verify, not up for debate.)

"Biden is not Trump's opponent." (Didn't need to be questioned, but apparently it's also up for debate?)

"There is no truth." (Then what are we talking about?)

"You can't trust CNN." (But anyone with a YouTube account and a webcam is trustworthy.)

"Vindman is from Ukraine, so we don't know what his loyalties are." (You can't tell how trustworthy a person is based on where they were born. Textbook racism.)

"Watch the DOJ." (My spy van is in the shop and I lack a desire to confirm your biases.)

"I love you." (You can't cross a bridge after you've just burned it to the ground.)

The fact is, a person can only form correct beliefs if they test those beliefs in the crucible of reality. Sitting on the couch in some shit-smelling hoarder's hovel living off of your retirement is not a recipe for finding the truth.

Beliefs must have consequences, and as a consequence of their beliefs, they won't be seeing me alive again. It's really the least I can do. I'm not interested in playing a stooge for them to gleefully fling their ignorance at.

You said FP "breaks down" when handling mutability, and you attributed that to some vague sense in which "mathematics" is the cause of it.

I have no bias for FP. I just don't understand what you're getting at.

>the purity of haskell does not remove the necessity of mutating data in that database.

That's great, because the purity of Haskell does not inhibit mutability. It just constrains it to lie within some mutable context.

>Modelling mutation with purity does not eliminate the problem it only moves the problem to another location.

Location? What is a location? It's like you're saying you can't truly add 3 + 3, because someone still has to add 1s under the hood. It's just a different model of the same problem.

Honestly, it sounds to me like you've never used the language, and your criticisms come off a bit like standing on an aircraft carrier shouting about how iron boats will never float.

Mathematicians have no trouble modeling change. There are many ways to do so. Some are algebraic, some are not. There is nothing wrong with modelling mutability using immutable structures: that is how you probably think about history, after all.

Either way, it is unclear what you're actually trying to say. Haskell has methods for modelling change of state through pure objects, but you're talking about that as though it were an inherently flawed or invalid approach, rather than one of many equally valid approaches to modelling state transformations.

>Not all aspects of programming can be described by math.

This is completely untrue. You may not be familiar with the math, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If you can model something well enough to understand it, then you can model it mathematically. There really isn't any domain of knowledge that math is unsuitable for, excepting if you don't know any relevant math to do.

The primary difference between computer science and mathematics proper is an overt concern for performance. Mathematical elegance and computational efficiency are not the same thing.

Haskell is a pretty awesome language, but it doesn't make it easy to incrementally optimize programs.

Not that I'm disagreeing with you in any way, but it's worth recognizing that imperative languages typically do pattern matching and type constraining in a declarative manner. So one could make an argument that what you're saying is only true because imperative languages are not forbidden from employing FP. If a language uses declarative constructs, then it's not a wholly imperative language.

I've disowned by family for their willingness to reject common and simple facts, their hostile attitude, their repeated willingness to denigrate all I stand for, and an utter lack of self-awareness. I'll let you guess who they vote for, because I can't be bothered to care.

>However, when someone responds in a way that says they are willing to at least consider an opposing view, I will have a conversation.

But what if they don't want a conversation? What if they want a "silent majority" that they will then claim to represent? What if they interpret a lack of resistance as evidence of support?

You may not be changing people's minds outright, but you do have some impact on the strength of their convictions, and their sense of how broadly held they are.