As a kid in the 90’s, being anti-* made me feel good.
In Flash/Flex 2000’s, monolith UI’s using AJAX was also super edgy & super fun.
At Accenture being in Emerging Tech felt like the pinnacle of my career.
While I ❤️ Functional Programming and Serverless, it is lonely in minority.
When people say “Hey, check out NestJS!” w/enthusiasm, I see the statefulness and mentally check out. I don’t want to be a killjoy so try to find the positives “Ah yes, types, Model View Controller ‘esque, and looks a lot like Angular on the server, nice!”
It’s painful when smarter than me, senior DevOps engineers mention “This new managed pipeline that you JUST deploy your Docker container too, and it handles all CI/CD and scaling!” Again, I hear “Docker” or “container” and just check out. State. I _do_ try to listen to learn, and help those in those areas w/basic programming & testing help.
The FP people appear to happily work away in their own jobs/projects. Sometimes they’ll go “We see you” and offer me jobs through Slack or LinkedIn. Some don’t appear to care, at all, they are using hipster tech w/minority mindshare. Many seem to ignore they risk being the “unemployed Haskell/Erlang developer with few job prospects” because they don’t want the non-Haskell/Erlang jobs anyway. Scala seems to be immune to this?
A few seem to be trapped, like myself, in non-FP work. You do your best to teach/evangelize, then go back to your Python/JavaScript/Go/Java day job.
Same for servers. “We’d love to use Lambda, but we’re still managing this ECS cluster kluster.”
The lights at the end of the tunnel seems to be:
- many FP people do stick together in weird ways
- UI is getting more FP, less stateful all the time regardless of framework
- tooling around Serverless is the fastest improver here
If you’re an extrovert like me, do NOT choose Functional Programming.