Ask HN: What happened to interest in FP recently?

+1 daydream&#x27;s comment on LLMs.<p>But I think the steam on FP hype was already starting to run out for unrelated reasons.<p>The briefest account I can offer on &quot;peak FP&quot; from my (web developer) perspective is that<p>1) functional programming was already enjoying a moment of renewed interest and vitality due to the increasing ubiquity of multi-core,<p>2) React&#x2F;Redux -- which ~solved[1] many problems with increasingly complex frontend web&#x2F;mobile state management -- really started to become mainstream around 2016-2017,<p>3) Node&#x2F;TypeScript was in the midst of an popularity &#x2F; enterprise adoption explosion (in part due to #1) and only served to amplify the general enthusiasm around FP among JS-literate engineers (in part due to #2).<p>In the intervening years, the React paradigm more-or-less &quot;won&quot; and multi-core is taken for granted. A huge chunk of our industry has probably never known a time where FP wasn&#x27;t celebrated. For that reason, it no longer seems to be answering any pressing problems, and naturally there are fewer articles being written about it.<p>[1] I expect this to be a point of consternation, since this is HN, but the point is that React was at least _perceived_ to have been an antidote to a variety of issues people faced with Angular, Backbone, plain old jQuery apps, etc. and the unifying theme of those issues was (rightly or wrongly) perceived as &quot;OO &#x2F; mutable state bad.&quot;

FP = Functional programming.<p>Yea, everyone else probably knows that. But maybe I&#x27;m tired, but it took me a while to parse that.

Most languages have incorporated something of FP. From cosmetic map and filter functions, to type checking were there was not much — in Python: Pydantic, mypy, pyright, etc. — to better versions of js with types (TS). In this sense, the influence of FP has been great.<p>IMHO it would be more productive if you defined what definition of FP you are using, because it seems very broad.<p>As for what is trendy, I am afraid I cannot help there.

My observation is that LLMs and AI are sucking the wind out of the sails of just about everything.<p>And when it comes to LLMs&#x2F;AI a lot of the code used to train, run inference, and actually use in products is Python, C&#x2F;C++, and maybe JavaScript. Not Haskell or Clojure or Lisp or anything like that.<p>Basically the FP discussions are old news.

I think a lot of Haskellers just got tired of arguing. I know I do so way less than back then. But I am writing Haskell more than ever nowadays (even at my dayjob!)