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Sharlintoday at 12:41 PM2 repliesview on HN

If we assume that the amount of training data matters at least a bit (which is a very reasonable asdumption), I wouldn’t immediately discard the functional hypothesis. Scala’s score is almost equal to Java’s even though there’s probably something like two orders of magnitude less Scala than Java code in the wild. Similarly with C# and Racket.


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nr378today at 1:01 PM

Yep I think you can reasonably argue that immutability + strong conventions are the most important dimensions (as opposed to FP vs. OOP, as much as I like FP and dislike OOP):

Immutable by convention + Strong conventions: 91.3% - Elixir 97.5%, Kotlin 90.5%, Racket 88.9%, C# 88.4%

Immutable by convention + Fragmented: 78.4% - Scala 78.4% (n=1)

Mutable + Strong conventions: 77.5% - Ruby 81.0%, Swift 78.5%, Julia 78.5%, Dart 78.0%, Go 71.7%

Mutable + Fragmented: 67.9% - Java 80.9%, R 75.8%, C++ 75.8%, Shell 72.9%, Python 65.3%, Perl 64.5%, TS 61.3%, JS 60.9%, PHP 53.8%

(my grouping is somewhat subjective)

f1shytoday at 12:52 PM

I agree with you, but, from the article: "The amount of training data doesn’t matter as much as we thought. Functional paradigms transfer well"

Anyway, I tend to think you are right, and the article is wrong in that sentence. (Or I misinterpreted something?)

I think both the quantity and quality of that has a big influence in the results.

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