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mahboi • yesterday at 7:41 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

Erlang is my favorite functional language out of all the ones I've tried. The matchers, guards, etc are all done very well. But I don't like functional. I used to think it was cool, gave it a real chance using Erlang for years, and eventually decided it's not a good fit for many use cases. Like at some point the neatness of doing all loops as recursion wears off and it's just tiring. It's not like CS algo homework, and even there you often want DP/memoization.

Edit: pure* functional


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sodapopcan • yesterday at 8:36 PM

> Like at some point the neatness of doing all loops as recursion wears off and it's just tiring.

Odd, but I believe you, lol. Elixir's list comprehensions take a `:reduce` option which makes accumulating values a bit more "familiar" and I often use over `reduce`:

    for a <- list, reduce: []
      acc ->
        [a | acc]
    end
Not sure if there is something like that in Erlang (or Gleam for that matter).
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