> To be kind, we’ve spent several decades twisting hardware to make the FP spherical cow work “faster”, at the expense of exponential growth in memory usage, and, some would argue, at the expense of increased fragility of software.
There is not one iota of support for functional programming in any modern CPU.
Doesn't makes any point very coherently, but it's not exclusively about FP though that gets mentioned a lot.
What does that mean in the context of the comment you reply to - which includes the literal quote about "twisting hardware to make the FP spherical cow work faster”? The article may not be exclusively about FP but nobody said it was.
Spherical cows are about simplifying assumptions that lead to absurd conclusions, not simplified models or simplified notation in general.
Calling functional programming a spherical cow when you mean that automatic memory management is a simplifying assumption, is such a gross sign of incompetence that nobody should keep reading the rest of the blog.
There aren’t any commonly-accepted conclusions from spherical cows because the bit is the punch line. It’s a joke a physics 101 student makes when toughing through problems that assume away any real-world complexity and thus applicability.
Spherical cows, in the real world, are pedagogical tools first, approximations second, and mis-applied models by inexperienced practitioners third.
“Hello World” is a spherical cow. Simplifying assumptions about data are spherical cows.
https://dataverse.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hd...
Even by the standards of substack TFA is an extraordinarily poor blogpost.
SoulMan•1h ago
TomatoCo•1h ago
JadeNB•48m ago
mkoubaa•45m ago