Functional programming readability
- by Jimmy Hoffa
I'm curious about this because I recall before learning any functional languages, I thought them all horribly, awfully, terribly unreadable. Now that I know Haskell and f#, I find it takes a little longer to read less code, but that little code does far more than an equivalent amount would in an imperative language, so it feels like a net gain and I'm not extremely practiced in functional.
Here's my question, I constantly hear from OOP folks that functional style is terribly unreadable. I'm curious if this is the case and I'm deluding myself, or if they took the time to learn a functional language, the whole style would no longer be more unreadable than OOP?
Has anybody seen any evidence or got any anecdotes where they saw this go one way or another with frequency enough to possibly say? If writing functionally really is of lower readability than I don't want to keep using it, but I really don't know if that's the case or not..
