*hands you a tf potion*

hey drink this

beware the gifted son to burnout puppygirl pipeline

I love keeping up with new game releases and especially indie games, but omg I am so tired of all of these emotionally gripping story-oriented games - especially when the underlying gameplay looks fun. I’m not sure if this is becoming more of a trend over time but I feel like 80-90% of new games that I hear about are all story-oriented, and the remaining 10-20% are indie games that often don’t catch my interest at all

I’m starting to think that in order to really grok functional programming you need a certain kind of brain. the kind that doesn’t just understand math but enjoys doing it

and like I understand that the philosophy is to maximize the use of pure functions and to program declaratively. but I’m not sure if I’ll ever understand why certain people value those things so highly that they’d go out of their way to use languages that are designed to support them. especially the languages like Haskell that don’t support any other style of writing your code

I was hoping that trying functional languages would make this more clear to me but unfortunately I think all of my experience in imperative scripting languages is getting in the way, because every time I struggle to do something basic in E.G. Haskell all I can think about is how easy it would be to do in Python instead. but that’s because I’ve been using Python for 20 years and I’m very bad at math - so it’s not a fair comparison

at least to me as someone who was taught to hate math in school, it feels like programming a nontrivial function in a functional style gets arcane very quickly. it’s like you have to solve a difficult math problem in your head in order to figure out what code to write, and then when someone else reads it they have to re-solve the same math problem in their head in order to understand how your equation works. and I’m not sure if it’s supposed to feel like that or if that’s just me being bad at math again

maybe if someone is learning programming for the first time and they really grok math, it feels the other way around for them? like imperative code takes a lot of mental energy, but functional code is effortless to read?

I guess I feel like - if I was ever going to understand the appeal of functional programming - I would have by now. I’ve read so many “why learn this functional language?” chapters at the beginning of different books, that talk in vague terms about how the language is pure or elegant. but for me everything is so much harder in functional-land and I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be harder or if it’s actually easier for those who grok it