February 19, 2023

Banner for review of external posts or old posts

Hi all!

I would like to share this blog article from John Carmack, a legendary figure of the video game industry – with the development of DOOM, Quake... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack)

Although this article was written ten years ago, this one is still relevant about the advantages of functional programming and the parallel with OOP. This concerns the disadvantages of “OOP programming” vs “functional programming”, mainly because it is hard to detect multithreaded and race conditions issues. Also, it delivers a beginning of solution with “how to mitigate it by doing “functional programming””.

Here is a little summary wrote in the article:

My pragmatic summary: A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in. In a multithreaded environment, the lack of understanding and the resulting problems are greatly amplified, almost to the point of panic if you are paying attention. Programming in a functional style makes the state presented to your code explicit, which makes it much easier to reason about, and, in a completely pure system, makes thread race conditions impossible.

John Carmack


In my opinion, C++ is better and better (especially in the last versions of the standard) to execute a first set of “functional programming”, despite the OOP pragmatism and construction around C++.

Don’t hesitate to read it here: http://sevangelatos.com/john-carmack-on/

About the author 

Axel Fortun

​Developer specialized in Linux environment and embedded systems.
​Knowledge in multiple languages as C/C++, Java, Python​ and AngularJs.
​Working as Software developer since 2014 with a beginning in the car industry​ and then in ​medical systems.