A couple of days ago, I read How Functional Programming Shaped (and Twisted) Frontend Development, a blog post by eng. Ahmad Alfy. I read it twice. It was almost mind blowing to me. It opened my mind and left me with many questions and thoughts. For sure, knowing what someone like eng. Alfy thinks about the current state of the Web is something. As I said, this article left me with many questions.
So I decided to ponder about them out loud here. For sure, this post is not a counter argument or a reply to eng. Alfy’s post. I’m just sharing my two cents on what I read. So, all in all I strongly suggest reading his article before continuing mine, even though it’s not mandatory to get along with the ideas and thought in my article. Also note that this post, mine, is more a philosophical wandering rather than a technical one.
That’s been said, I’d like to raise the question of Progress, especially, technological progress. But even before that, why we needed technology in the first place? Short answer is: to solve problems. But what I like to raise is that we live in a material world. And matter is by neccessity is impure. We live in an imperfect world. Solving problems for good is impossible, by necessity. And what really happens is that we solve problems by creating others! And what matter at the end is one question, whether life is easier by those new problems or not? Was it worth it? I know this view is strange, but let me give an example. Back in the time, when the early humans invented a knife. They really needed that for hunting, for food and for defending themselves against the wild life. A knife solved many problems and made life easier for sure, but it’s not all roses. The same knife used for good can be used for bad, humans can harm themselves or others. Apply the same on literally every technology we came up with throughout the history.
We can find this idea embodied strongly in the world of software, as a matter of fact, Software in itself is a way of solving problems. Anyhow, looking onto the software world, we find out each technology, idea, concept, framework we come up with try to solve a problem. And by neccessity it creates other problems in its way.
And that raises a question, does that mean we have to let go of this techonoly as we find out it causes problems? Short answer: No. What I believe, and what I’m trtying to learn myself, is to study this specific techonlogy, understand, why we had to come up with it in the first place, what problems it solves, what problems it creates, how to mitegate these problems, and so on. And with all of these questions, I’m trying to answer some bigger questions, do I need this solution, techonlogy, for this specific problem I have now? Is it the best solution? As, by neccessity, there’s no such a thing as THE SOLUTION, there’s A solution that fits and that what really matters.
Going back to the original article and the questions it raises, we find out that functional programming is a set of ideas, concepts and theories that live in the open, they’re uncolored, and we, humans, color them by putting them in a context and putting them into practice. Understanding this is crucial.
What I’m trying to do, as a software engineer, is try to understand what Functional Programming really is, why some software engineer decided to use it and integrate it into Frontend, what problems they tried to solve, and to what extent they succeeded. Then finally, I need to take a step back and ask if these solutions fits the problem I’m facing.
At the end of the day, I think what really matters is awareness. To me, progress isn’t about rushing to adopt the latest paradigm or framework. It’s about understanding why it exists, what it tries to fix, and what new cracks it might open. Only then can we make choices that fit our context, not because they’re modern, but because they make sense.