Carson Gross’ “Codin’ Dirty” essay is designed to provoke controversy. Although I will critique the essay, I want to make it clear that I am (on this Thanksgiving eve) grateful for Carson Gross’s work. Gross writes: I’m … not trying to convince you to code dirty with this essay. Rather, I want to show that it is possible to write reasonably successful software this way and, I hope, offer some balance around software methodology discussions. ...
When I first became interested in functional programming, a more experienced engineer told me: “you know functional programming doesn’t really amount to much more than procedural programming.” As I insisted on the benefits of map, filter and reduce, he simply shook his head. “You’re thinking in the small. Go look at a large real-world application.” It took some time for me to see what he meant. My preferred language, Clojure, is a functional language. But too often it is used to build top-down, imperative applications. This negates the value proposition of functional programming: isolating side effects, local reasoning, and system composition. ...
This is the first in a multi-part series, “Brittle Clojure”. In this series, we will consider common patterns in Clojure which yield brittle systems, as well as methods to ensure robustness. None of the basic principles for building robust software are unique. Most literature, however, is focused on object-oriented systems. Our point of view will sometimes zoom in to Clojure “in the small”, and sometimes zoom out to distributed systems built with Clojure. ...