God, I never get tired of the condescending "I lost my interest at" or "I stopped reading at". Always strongly reinforces in my mind how irrefutably confused and misguided the original article is, and how thankful I am to be shepherded into the light by so wise a poster. I myself am not typically able to dismiss everything someone has to say by the reading of a single point, but I've noticed a lot of other people seem to be able to.
Look, this is a very long article, it really wasn't worth reading and to be honest bad_user summed up a fundamental flaw.
And I'm saying that having read it. Three times. I wish I'd taken bad_user's comment on face value but your comment and the author's comments made me read it.
Whole chapters were squirming before my eyes that seemed to make a single tiny point. Was I missing some gem of knowledge to unlock the shockingly badly written conclusion (otherwise known in writer circles as 'Um, what was I saying?')? Whole rambling diatribes could have been cut down to single sentences ('Building a Deck' and 'The Miracle Deck', I'm looking at you.). A little of my soul died inside. I thought I was missing something because he waffled so much.
I wasn't.
And 'I lost my interest at' perfectly sums it up.
This is an old article by someone who at the time wasn't a very good writer.
The core points of the article are sound, the author is right about programs being too brittle, but he took a lot of words to say it and his conclusion buried unconventionally in the middle of the article is way, way, way, way, way, way, way off the mark and the article is a massive chore to read. This is from 2006 and it shows.
Not really. I didn't see the author ever claim you could magically control external mutable state, indeed he explicitly acknowledged that:
> Unfortunately, adding the toolbar bar to the window may not truly be an atomic operation down deep, but from your perspective it is, since you can't make the mutation operation any smaller. You may not have completely eliminated the chance of things going into a bad state, but you've minimized it as far as you can.
He just says "do the best you can with your own software, and here are some ideas about it". It's an old article, appropriate for its time (detailed because many people were new to functional concepts) and yet surprisingly prescient (the rise of functional languages did occur). Nobody forced you to read it if you happen to be some whiz-functional programmer to whom all the points are intuitively obvious. Honestly, I don't understand the negative tone in many of the comments.
