this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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[–] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There's no such thing as a pure functional language. All it would accomplish is warming the CPU up. All such languages store data away at some point.

[–] docAvid@midwest.social 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Your statement implies it. Having stateless or declarative functions that never store or retrieve data would mean they are pure functions.

[–] docAvid@midwest.social 1 points 8 months ago

No, my question does not imply a pure functional language at all. Pure functions exist in languages which are not purely functional. Most of the functions I write are pure functions. I could have a workflow where I work with another programmer who handles the minimal stateful pieces, and I would only write stateless functions - would that make me not a programmer?

(There are also purely functional languages, by the way. I just didn't remotely imply there were, or make any claims about them, at any point in this thread, prior to this parenthetical.)

The part about declarative languages has nothing to do with state, or functional languages. Declarative languages are a whole different thing. Of course declarative languages handle state. The comment I was replying to said "Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow". Declarative languages don't involve juggling control flow.