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Comment by mercurial | Hacker News Reader

My beef with plain functions is that you can't mock them properly. But apart from this, yes. Referential transparency as much as possible.

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This is highly dependent on your language. A language where functions can be passed as values allows functions to be injected as parameters (for polymorphic behavior). In Clojure, you can even replace a function definition just for unit tests without dependency injection at all.

For example, with-redefs. This allows you to replace a given function anywhere in the whole codebase with any lambda. This rebinding only lasts inside the scope of the s-expression. When I realized that, I realized everything I knew about DI and interfaces were just hacks of incredible complexity to get around a poor language that wasn't built to allow unit testing. I now think it's impossible to have both unit testing and a good design in Java/C#. Neither were made to be easy to unit test, it wasn't even a concept when Java was made.

In C#'s defense, there is a way to mock a static function by replacing it using the Mocks library. To MS's shame, that library requires the 13k edition of Visual Studio. When I realized that, I realized I want to leave C# for good. I'm not interested anymore in a language that resists testing so much I have to choose between an easy to understand design and unit tests.

Hm, that may be true for Clojure (or Python, as long as you don't redefine anything important), but I wouldn't how to do that with Haskell, for instance.

It's true that you can't replace arbitrary pieces with no source changes in Haskell. On the other hand, there are a few approaches to making this easier - implicit parameters seems made for this kind of thing, "foo = fooBy whatever" as a pattern leaves it easy to swap in an alternative; and of course keeping functions pure it becomes less necessary to swap out internal bits because they don't matter.

What situation would require to mock a function ?

Maybe I'm not interested in testing what the function does? But yes, for pure functions, it's kind of a weak argument. More generally, you can't really swap a different implementation in place.

I answered this in my other answer to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709395

It's a common misconception that interfaces are the only way to do polymorphism, because that's usually the only way in Java.

when you require unit tests to finish quickly for functions doing io or otherwise time consuming processes. this being a good idea or not I'll leave to the threads about dhh's tdd article

I would argue that functions have no business performing global side-effects in the first place --- these things are better expressed as state encapsulators (such as objects) anyway.

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