> 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.
An executive is retiring. He's been very fond of horse races, but has been very responsible throughout the years. Now with some free time on his hands, he spends more time than ever at the tracks and collects large amounts of data. He takes his data, along with his conviction that he's certainly onto something, to a friend in research at a nearby university. He convinces his friend to take a look at his data and find a model they can use to win at betting. After many delays, and the researcher becoming more disheveled over months of work, he returns to the retired executive to explain his model. He begins "if we assume all the horses are identical and spherical..."
Well, for sure, a core tenet of computer science is that all models of computing are equally powerful in what inputs they can map to what outputs, if you set aside any other details
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.
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