The Death of Imperative Programming
I got a note from my manager, a link to this article and the words:
Found something that might stir you up
and sure enough, it did.
I can certainly understand that the rise of the functional languages is going to effect the traditional uses of imperative languages. Certainly for a lot of the uses - I'll even say the majority of cases, performance isn't an issue, and functional languages have the benefit of immutability and therefore a lot less error-prone. While developing in a functional language is vastly difference than an imperative one, there are still reasons to learn the functional approach, and make use of immutable data types - even in imperative languages.
But to think that imperative languages are going to die?
Yeah… No. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
Functional languages - even the most mature ones suffer from the garbage collection problem. If you're going to be creating immutable objects and doing anything with them, you're going to be creating new ones all the time. Kinda goes without saying. And this is where they all suffer.
Java is great, save the GC pauses. Erlang too, with it's smaller GC pauses, but they are still there.
For the rest of my life, to be sure, there are going to be a need for developers that are capable of doing the "hard stuff" - regardless of how many improvements the functional languages make.
Performance is going to matter.