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Functional Design in Clojure

Ep 024: You Are Here, but Why?

35 min • 12 april 2019

Christoph needs to test his logic, but he must pry it from the clutches of side effects.

  • Last week we ended up with "imperative mud": lots of nested I/O and logic.
  • (01:45) Difficult to test when all the I/O and logic are mixed together.
    • Object-oriented programming advocates for "mocking" objects with side-effects
    • Mocking reinforces and expands the complexity
  • Complexity stems from all the different branches of execution: mainline, exceptions, corner cases, etc.
  • With the imperative approach, no way to just "jump" to step 2 and test that in isolation. Have to setup all the mocks to tilt the flow of control in the desired direction.
  • The Go language handles the "error flow" problem by making error returns explicit (no exceptions), but that further compounds the branching problem.
  • (05:25) A different approach to deal with nesting: "happy path" route
    • Mainline of execution is the most common case.
    • Any error is thrown which has to be handled out of band.
  • "Exceptions are much better at mocking you than you are at mocking them."
  • Even more problems with mocking: suppose you want to test exponential backoff
    • API handle mock has to fail a couple of times and then succeed.
    • Requires a "stateful" mock!
  • "You have whole object hierarchies that are only in use for your tests!"
  • (07:35) Key observation: imperative programming uses the location of execution as a way of encoding information.
    • Code in the first branch of the "if" statement "knows" something different than code in the second branch.
    • Position in the flow of control is implicit information
  • Change implicit information to explicit information and you can flatten out the code.
  • Implicit: "You are here because you did X."
  • Explicit: "Separating where I am from what to do next."
  • "In an imperative flow, the fact you made it to line 3 means something."
  • (09:55) To get out of the problem of nesting, we need to have positive, represented information instead of implicit, contextual information.
  • Pattern is: logic, I/O, logic, I/O, logic, I/O, etc.
  • Capture each one as a multimethod: a "worker" method and a "decider" method.
    • The "worker" method dispatches on a "command", just does one thing, and returns the result.
    • "My job is not to question why. My job is but to do or die."
    • "I don't know if we need to get into the class struggle."
    • The "decider" method takes a command and a result, looks at them, decides what to do next, returns a command.
  • (18:50) You can work out all the scenarios, and the logic for each scenario is pure!
    • Testing becomes a matter of setting the data
    • Steps can be tested independently
  • (19:45) A "result" isn't simply spewing back the raw data from the I/O
    • Worker picks out the relevant parts and return those
    • Use spec or schema to document responses
    • Can use meta or a nested key (like :raw) to attach raw data for debugging or the "attempt" log (see Ep 022)
  • Logic should operate on well-known fields, but recording raw responses is useful for telling a story later on.
  • (22:45) Main flow of execution becomes a simple loop + recur
    1. Dispatch command to worker and bind response
    2. Dispatch command + response to decider and bind new-command
    3. (when new-command (recur new-command))
  • (24:30) A downside of the approach: it can be harder to see cases that are not covered, like an unsupported command or unhandled response
  • Once again, unit tests can help ensure coverage for the "deciders".
  • (27:30) How to test the worker?
    • They don't have any logic except doing the side effect.
    • Even "picking" the right values from the data could be factored as a pure function
    • Can test with the REPL. Try out the side effect and then leave it alone.
  • (29:50) Application testing creates another problem
  • What about testing the UI? We want to see changes in the data, but we don't want to actually post for real.
  • Great topic for next time.

Message Queue discussion:

  • (32:05) Do we post the source code for episodes?
  • We post some code in the show notes, but less so for a high-level series.
  • Send us links to your code and we'll put them on the website.

Related episodes:

Clojure in this episode:

  • loop
  • recur
  • meta
  • when
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