Comment by nfrmatk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nfrmatk | Hacker News Reader

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I think Gary Bernhardt's corresponding Boundaries conference talk [1] is quite good, particularly because of how pragmatic he is in introducing the topic.

I have been thinking about and trying to work with this paradigm for a few years now. To be honest, it's been a struggle. Partly because it requires unlearning some habits and partly because there's limited opportunity to practice in my $DAYJOB where I'm working in codebases heavily invested in other paradigms.

I've seen and read many, many videos, blog posts, etc. on this topic. Everyone loves to introduce the concept with a contrived example and then stop there. What I would love to see more of are complete examples for everything from simple to complex applications.

I think there's potentially a lot of value in thinking this way (or at least taking as much from it as you can), but it's hard to learn and then to teach others without more examples to draw on.

[1]: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries

I've used this for many real applications that I would characterise as small (biggest being ~10KLOC excluding tests, types, etc.). I've applied the pattern across entire codebases and to specific components within much larger codebases which follow other patterns. I tend to combine it with some of the ideas in Mitchell Hashimoto's talk Advanced Testing with Go[0] - particularly small interfaces and defining test stubs alongside real implementations.

In practice my imperative shell tends to have two layers. The inner layer is responsible for executing the imperative logic, while the outer layer is responsible for initialising configuration and dependencies, invoking the inner layer, and adhering to any sort of external interface that it may need to satisfy. Everything from the inner layer down through the functional core can be comprehensively tested using stub objects only -- no need to patch anything.

Unfortunately everything I've applied this pattern to is proprietary, so I can't share any code examples.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yszygk1cpEc

I also did it for a Go app recently exactly like that.

It was mostly about putting the "imperative" part closer to main.go and putting business rules and things like that in the other files: Routing, serialization, validation, business rules, data transformation, command line argument parsing, configuration parsing, they all go in the "functional" part. Instantiating the HTTP server, reading argv, files and reading/writing to the database goes in the "imperative" part.

The major hurdle for me is frameworks and libraries that often want to be used in an imperative way. Some routers, for, instance could be purely functional, but they often want to instantiate the HTTP server themselves. Not a big issue in practice in Golang, though.

Also: the database. To keep purity in a simple way, you gotta wrap the imperative parts and use callback-ish structures. This part is often where I cheat. But with a proper abstraction it's great. I hate to say the forbidden word here, but a "monadic" abstraction you can have your cake and eat it. I never did it in Golang and I have no idea whether it would work, but, I did it in C# and it was a breeze.

I agree with your assessment about testing. In the end it was incredibly easy for me to get 100% coverage on the functional part.

Would love to see an example of your monadic database abstraction

If you're familiar with Node.js promises, you already know how it works. I just pass a hollow "DB" object to my controllers that can perform queries and commands, but instead of returning data imperatively, I use JS-like "promises" to chain the next steps. On the "success" callback you have the result of queries. At the end I will just return this "chain of statements" that wasn't executed yet. I only really run everything at the "imperative" layer, within a database transaction.

  return DB.Query(...).ThenCommand(res => ...).ThenHttpSuccess(res => ...);

That's also similar to how Haskell IO works. If you desugar the "do" syntax, you get something like this. Of course I said "monadic" between quotes above because it doesn't follow the functor/monad laws, it's just a Fluent interface promise-thing tailor-made for that very small app.

A big issue is that this was in very small project. Promises are not exactly pretty, and the code is not the easiest to maintain if you don't know how they work, which is why I "cheated" on the Golang app. I think someone else smarter might be able to figure this problem out too, though :)

> In practice my imperative shell tends to have two layers.

Doesn't that boil down to a hexagonal design, ports & adapters, that is also mentioned at the end of the Boundaries video?

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