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0 pointshansvm1y ago0 comments

It's a matter of framing. Think of any of the following:

- Refreshing daily "points" in some mobile app (handling the clock running backward, network connectivity lapses, ...)

- Deciding whether to send an marketing e-mail (have you been unsubscribed, how recently did you send one, have you sent the same one, should you fail open or closed, is this person receptive to marketing, ...)

- How do you represent a person's name and transform it into the things your system needs (different name fields, capitalization rules, max characters, what it you try to put it on an envelope and it doesn't fit, ...)

- Authorization logic (it's not enough to "just use a framework" no matter your programming style; you'll still have important business logic about who can access what when and how the whole thing works together)

And so on. Everything you're doing is mapping inputs to outputs, and it's important that you at least get it kind of close to correct. Some people think functional programming helps with that.

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whatnow373731y ago

When I see this list all I can think of is how all these things are just generic, abstract rules and have nothing to do with programming. This, of course, is my problem. I have a strange mental model of things.

I can't shake off the feeling we should be defining some clean sort of "business algebra" that can be used to describe these kind of notions in a proper closed form and can then be used to derive or generate the actual code in whatever paradigm you need. What we call code feels like a distraction.

I am wrong and strange. But thanks for the list, it's helpful and I see FP's points.

hansvmOP1y ago

You're maybe strange (probably not, when restricted to people interested in code), but wrongness hasn't been proven yet.

I'd push back, slightly, in that you need to encode those abstract rules _somehow_, and in any modern parlance that "somehow" would be a programming language, even if it looks very different from what we're used to.

From the FP side of things, they'd tend to agree with you. The point is that these really are generic, abstract rules, and we should _just_ encode the rules and not the other state mutations and whatnot that also gets bundled in.

That implicitly assumes a certain rule representation though -- one which takes in data and outputs data. It's perfectly possible, in theory, to describe constraints instead. Looking at the example of daily scheduling in the presence of the clock running backward; you can define that in terms of inputs and outputs, or you can say that the desired result satisfies (a) never less than the wall clock, (b) never decreases, (c) is the minimal such solution. Whether that's right or not is another story (it probably isn't, by itself -- lots of mobile games have bugs like that allowing you to skip ads or payment forever), but it's an interesting avenue for exploration given that those rules can be understood completely orthogonally and are the business rules we _actually_ care about, whereas the FP, OOP, and imperative versions must be holistically analyzed to ensure they satisfy business rules which are never actually written down in code.

codr71y ago

I agree.

Especially when reading Rust or C++.

That's code I would prefer to have generated for me as needed in many cases, I'm generally not that interested in manually filling in all the details.

Whatever it is, it hasn't been created yet.

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