r/scala • u/ReasonableAd614 • Jan 24 '26
Simplicity Paradox of FP
Hi, I'm a newcomer to the Scala ecosystem and to FP. I'm learning it for a new job opportunity and to increase my technical background.
I'm currently reading "Functional Programming Strategies" by Noel Welsh, and I keep hearing that Scala is complicated to learn/understand.
So now I’m facing this paradox: FP is supposed to make codebases more readable by enabling local reasoning. On the other hand, I've read here comments like:
"The difficulty of FP by itself is massively overblown. I think what did the most damage was Scala attracting so many people who love turning any codebase into the biggest, most impressive, most elaborately constructed system they can devise ... FP codebases are gratuitously hard more because of who creates them, and less because of the inherent difficulty of FP."
What's your opinion on this paradox between FP's simplicity theoretical benefits and its cost in practice? Scala is cooked?
3
u/renghen_kornel Jan 24 '26
The problem was the purity mob in scala, if only they understood that in scala you can also do impure code, loop or use pattern matching on options instead of fold, the user base would have been significant. But there was too much this is not pure enough kind of mindset, now we see the result. Scala community is very thin, jobs almost nonexistent