As someone without a lot of experience (in my first dev job now), would you care to expand on this? Does this mean that you wouldn’t have a function fn() that manipulates a global variable VAR, but rather you’d pass VAR like fn(VAR)?

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WalterBright 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

To expand on the other reply, some related things:

1. don't do console I/O in leaf functions. Instead, pass a parameter that's a "sink" for output, and let the caller decide what do with it. This helps a lot when converting a command line program to a gui program. It also makes it practical to unit test the function

2. don't allocate storage in a leaf function if the result is to be returned. Try to have storage allocated and free'd in the same function. It's a lot easier to keep track of it that way. Another use of sinks, output ranges, etc.

3. separate functions that do a read-only gathering of data, from functions that mutate the data

Give these a try. I bet you'll like the results!

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samatman 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

I heartily agree with #2 if the language isn't Zig. Which actually supports your point: allocating in leaf functions is idiomatic in Zig, and it works out fine, because there's no allocation without an Allocator, and even if that's passed in implicitly as part of a struct argument, error{OutOfMemory} will be part of the function signature. So there's no losing track of what allocates and what doesn't.

This actually supports your broader point about always passing state to functions, and never accessing it implicitly. Although I don't know that I agree with extending that to constants, but maybe with another several decades of experience under my belt I might come to.

Zig also makes it easy for 'constants' to change based on build-specific parameters, so a different value for testing, or providing an override value in the build script. I've found that to eliminate any problems I've had in the past with global constants. Sometimes, of course, it turns out you want those values to be runtime configurable, but as refactorings go that's a relatively straightforward one.

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WalterBright 7 months ago | parent [-]

> So there's no losing track of what allocates and what doesn't.

Having an allocator implicitly passed in with a struct argument is not quite what I meant. D once had allocators as member functions, but that wound up being deprecated because the allocation strategy is only rarely tied to the struct.

	▲	samatman 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		There are some meaningful differences between Zig and D in this specific area, specifically, D uses exceptions and has garbage collection as the default memory strategy. That will surely result in different approaches to the leaf-allocation question being better for the one than for the other.

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chipdart 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

> Give these a try. I bet you'll like the results!

It sounds like too many words to refer ro plain old inversion of control and CQRS. They're both tried and true techniques.

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maxbond 7 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You've got the gist of it. By decoupling your function from the state of your application, you can test that function in isolation.

For instance, you might be tempted to write a function that opens an HTTP connection, performs an API call, parses the result, and returns it. But you'll have a really hard time testing that function. If you decompose it into several tiny functions (one that opens a connection, one that accepts an open connection and performs the call, and one that parses the result), you'll have a much easier time testing it.

(This clicked for me when I wrote code as I've described, wrote tests for it, and later found several bugs. I realized my tests did nothing and failed to catch my bugs, because the code I'd written was impossible to test. In general, side effects and global state are the enemies of testability.)

You end up with functions that take a lot of arguments (10+), which can feel wrong at first, but it's worth it, and IDEs help enormously.

This pattern is called dependency injection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_injection

See also, the "functional core, imperative shell" pattern.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTkzNHF6rMs

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pjc50 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes. Global variables or singletons are deeply miserable when it comes to testing, because you have to explicitly reset them between tests and they cause problems if you multithread your tests.

A global variable is a hidden extra parameter to every function that uses it. It's much easier if the set of things you have to care about is just those in the declared parameters, not the hidden globals.