Is Functional Programming Feasible?

I find Functional Programming quite natural. Recursion is trivial, and higher order functions are not such a big deal. Except I have forgotten how long it took me to fully grasp these concepts. I forgot that the first time I saw map and fold in action, I had a hard time understanding what the program actually did.

I often read that functional programs are easier to read, maintain, and debug. I also hear the same about imperative programs (Object Oriented as well as simply procedural ones). Currently, I am not sure which side is right. Personally, if I am given a powerful functional language, I will program faster and cleaner. End of discussion. But what about my fellow programmers? Will they do any good? Do they think they can do any good? I think there is some kind of trade-of: functional programs often use more powerful abstractions than imperative ones. The result is more concise code. On one hand, that mean less code to write, maintain, and debug. On the other hand, each piece of code carries more meaning, and is therefore likely to be more difficult to write, maintain, and debug. My point is to find which is more practical. By "practical", I mean usable in the "real world", where the big money is.

Let's start with an overview of the abstractions used by the imperative, procedural programming style, that the functional style lack.

Side effect. A side effect is something that defines a before, and an after. For example, printing "Hello World!" on the screen is a side effect: before, nothing is displayed. After, the message is visible on the screen. The state of the screen has been modified. (Note that side effects are ill-named : more often than not, we mean them).

Flow. An imperative program do things, one at a time, in a precise given order. The first thing to do comes first, the second comes second, an so on. When the program has to do things repeatedly, it is still in a precise given order. We need the notion of flow because these things are mostly side effects.

Assignment. An assignment is a particular kind of side effect: storing a new value in a variable, overwriting the old. It is the most important thing imperative programs do. (This is different from initialization, were the value is stored in a new variable as it is created.)

Flow control structures. Basically, we have three of them : "if", "while", and "for". I will not insult you by explaining those. (Functional languages have an "if", actually: it works the same as the C ternary operator "?:".)

To sum up quickly, Functional style is an imperative style without side effect. No flow of time, each variable is constant, and we don't have loops. Now, what can be done under such drastic restrictions? Computations. Given an input (a value), I can produce an output (another value). I just have to call some function or write some expression. Of course, if a program need to perform IO or user interaction, we need imperative features. However, large parts of many programs are mere computations.

Conclusion: there is a room for functional style. Now, is it a good idea to actually use it were we can? To answer this, I remember the most important questions: Is my code correct? Is it readable? Correctness and readability are always an issue when writing software, for code is rarely bug free, and programmers rarely work alone. Readability is often considered most important. For instance, If some piece of code looks scary, common wisdom say it can't be readable. Then, we can't check it's correctness. Conclusion, it belongs to the garbage, for we can't risk money and jobs in scary code. So, if functional programming is scary, we can't use it. To many, functional programming is scary: to actually compute anything interesting, functional programming encourages the use of features which are, for some reason and many people, scary. (These people often say: impractical.)

The first of these features is recursion. Functions can be defined in terms of themselves. Recursion looks quite foreign, almost magic: how the hell can I use something I have not defined yet? If we need to check the correctness of a recursive function, for example, we first have to assume it is correct. This kind of "bootstrapped" proof often look insane, although it is common in mathematics (I know it since high school).

Currently, any decent programming language, functional or not, support recursion. I think this is because sometimes, recursion is the only reasonable option (when implementing a sort, for example). Anyway, scary recursion is not encouraged by imperative languages. Some people still say it is inefficient (sadly, some implementations still prove them right). We have while loops, and we know them for a long time so why bother?

The second of these features is first class functions. That is, a function is a value like any other. Like any other value, it can be computed, stored in a variable (a new one, unless the language has imperative features) or passed as argument. Very few imperative languages support that. Who would ever want to pass a function as argument? Actually, we do : we have listeners and callbacks, data structures are accessed through iterators, objects are used to mimic closures... We just don't think about these as functions. Because of this, higher order functions are still perceived as an alien concept good for research, experts, or the garbage (remember the big money).

I remember the first time I really wondered if any programmer can handle a powerful language. My brother, who were studying set theory at the time, came to me to solve a problem. He haven't grasped the difference between "A belongs to B" and "A is included in B". First, it was easy to explain that in the former, "A is an element of the set B" and in later, "A is a subset of the set B". There, one can imagine the world as little crosses, the elements, surrounded by circles, the sets. Then, we saw in horror this description: "the set of the subsets of A". So we have some sets (the subsets of A), each of those included in another set (A), while being an element of some "superset". My brother, still thinking in terms of crosses and circles (utterly inappropriate in this case), had a hard time understanding these "higher order sets". As I have no problems with those, I tried to explain. I failed.

I think the main problem with recursion and higher order functions is self reference. With recursion, we have objects referencing themselves. With higher order functions, we have a concept referencing itself. Self reference is scary. Self reference leads to paradoxes and contradictions. I really hope I am wrong here, because self reference is a powerful tool for computing. It leads to recursion, which is convenient. It leads to higher order functions, which are powerful. It leads to macros (of the lisp kind: programs that write programs), which may be the best way to factor out code.

OK, Functional programming is scary. Why imperative, procedural programming is not? Because each line of a procedural code is very simple. The most complicated are the assignment and the function call. A procedural program do one thing at a time, so each step can be understood easily. We don't even have to talk about the flow or the state of the program. These are implicit, intuitive. To represent them, one can imagine a little worker, or robot, or whatever, performing each action described by the code, one by one. To understand the hole program, one has just to step from the beginning to the end, step by step. If the program is carefully documented, calls to procedures and functions can be understood without looking at their code. And most important, we can avoid scary features. We don't even have to think about them.

However, not being scary does not mean being better : the flow of time, while intuitive, is quite complicated to describe mathematically. Because of that, proving the correctness of even the simplest imperative program is a pain (try to prove some while loop). Variables must be checked against unexpected changes, and even expected changes must occur in the right order. Each line is very simple, but one have to embrace the whole program in her head to understand it anyway.

My conclusion is simple. As long as powerful abstractions are scary, functional programming will be considered impractical. Whether they are scary for good reasons or not, I do not know.

Does OOP really suck?

Foreword: smaltalk zealots, don't be upset, I am bashing mainly C++ and Java.

Object Oriented Programming was quite a revolution. It even became mandatory in any project large enough. If you're not using OOP for your current project, then it is doomed. Or is it? Why?

Sure OOP has advantages. Two majors ones I heard of are : code reuse, and encapsulation. That sounds great. Code reuse means I will have less code to write, less code to read, and less code to debug. Encapsulation means I will not know irrelevant implementation details about what I use, which is quite useful for teamwork.

Just a few words about intuitiveness. Some people say OOP is meant to be intuitive, but I think such a concern is irrelevant. For example, representing numbers with a sequence of figures is most counter intuitive (yes it is, for children). A much more intuitive way would be to represent them with a set of small balls. Or with a set of different things (the Egyptian numeration system was based on that : one symbol for the units, another for the dozens, an so on for each power of ten). However, the positional system we use today is far more concise and easier to use, once we have learnt it. What I think is important is ease of use, and, to some extent, ease of learning. Not intuitiveness.

Before OOP, we were doing structured programming. Remember the old days when we had the data on one hand, and the code on the other hand. A program was roughly a set of modules. A module is just some "place" (typically a couple of files), in which we store the definition of a data structure and the code which process it (a set of functions). The nominal way to use a module is to call it's functions on variables of it's data-type.

/* How to use a module */
/* 1: create some instance of the type shmilblick*/
shmilblick data;
/* 2: Use it */
process(data);
process2(data, stuff);
/* ... */

Then, OOP provided us a new way to divide our programs. A program is roughly a set of classes. A class is some place (typically a couple of files), in which we store the definition of some data (the member data), and the code which process it (a set of methods). We can now turn our code above into:

// How to use a class
// 1: create some instance of the class shmilblick
class shmilblick data;

// 2: Use it
data.process();
data.process2(stuf);
// ...

I have deliberately chosen an example where the procedural code and the OO one were isomorphic. This can look unfair, but the reality is often like this: OO syntax with procedural semantics. So let's start with more serious stuff.

When doing OOP, directly accessing the data is considered evil. So OO languages provided us a way to forbid programmers to do so : the "private" members. I have an interface (the "public" methods), so I have nothing to do with implementation. Actually, it's fine. It is now more difficult for me to damage the program. Or is it? Encapsulated data is data accessible from a given place (a class, a module, or a file) and no other. We can achieve that even with languages which don't enforce such discipline. Data encapsulation may have been introduced by OOP, but it is not specifically OO. Sure, providing support for encapsulation is more convenient than not to, but a language does not have to be OO do do this.

Besides, Object Oriented Programming is meant to promote code reuse. That is The Big Thing. The more I reuse my code (or other's), the less code I write. Less code have less bug, is produced faster, and is likely to be more maintainable. Code reuse can mean two things : the code I write will be easier to reuse, or It will be easier for me to write code that can be reused. All other things being equals, I prefer the former over the later, since the later require a conscious effort when writing my code, or at least a fair bit of refactoring. It is also possible to have a mix of the two, depending on what mechanisms are available. When we talk about OO, we generally talk about these: inheritance, design patterns, polymorphism (ad-hoc), and genericity.

If not carefully used, inheritance is dangerous : some implementation changes in the base class can compromise the correctness of the inherited ones. We can loose the benefit of encapsulation. (I don't remember the toy example I was told about. It had something to do with list processing.) Code sharing through inheritance is then quite difficult, unless a certain level of stability can be assumed from the base class. However, the combination of inheritance and late binding lead to ad-hoc polymorphism, which is quite useful when one wants to have a set of object of the same type that behave differently. This feature is powerful, but not exclusively OO : the same behaviour can be achieved with dynamic typing. Just imagine a print function which behave appropriately (and differently) with integers and strings. Then, the real advantage of Ad-hoc polymorphism through inheritance is binding the code to the behaviour (and the class) rather than to the functionality. Apart from that, it looks like just a way of getting around a static type system.

Design patterns are more a way of programming than a language feature. They just fit well with the current usage of the most popular OO languages these days. A design pattern is roughly a incomplete snippet of code that solve some class of problems. Each time one have a similar problem, she copy (and completes) the appropriate snippet. At the expense of writing a few time (if not many) the same kind of code, we are supposed to write more maintainable and less buggy code. My concern here is : can't we factor out these patterns? I am personally more and more annoyed when I see similar pieces of code again and again (a good example being "for" loops, especially those verbose ones from C). Worse : some design patterns are factored out : those which mimic functional programming, just because the language lacks closures and anonymous functions.

Genericity is probably the most important: we often need to apply some behaviour on data of several (if not all) datatypes. Writing code for each datatype is almost nonsense, if we have a way around this. Genericity is such a way. Great, but definitely not an OO concept. Only true Object languages, in which everything is an object, can naturally achieve this through mere inheritance. Otherwise, we have the ugly C++ templates, or a type inference like in ML and Haskell, or just a dynamic type system.

Conclusion : I don't know if OO really suck. I don't know OO well enough. However, I am under the impression that OO designs are often a way to empower an otherwise weak language, but without giving it full power. For example, I am currently coding a neural network, for an application in the Real World. A neural network takes an sequence of real numbers as input, and return a real number as output. This is a function. More accurately, this is a parametrized function. The parameters (a number of thresholds) are used to define the exact behaviour of the network. And I want to work with several networks at once. So the function we need happens to be a closure. I use a language which don't support closures, so I am forced to wrap each network into an object, using a quite verbose pattern. That suck.

First Time

My first ever entry in a blog. so far, so good.