[leafboi]

they use the term breaking down a monolith and "architecture" so from that you can derive that it's literally about using an entire VM or computer to enforce boundaries.

Folders and files are used in "monoliths" anyway. Nothing new to talk about that here. Are you implying that their monolith is just one big file and they're beginning the process of breaking that thing down into multiple files and different folders?

I don't know about you but that doesn't make any sense to me.

[exterm]

Hey Leafboi - I recommend reading the first post in the series for some background https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/deconstruc...

We don't use "hardware" or "VMs" to facilitate modularity.

[leafboi]

All right. I'm wrong. Didn't know this. Thanks for linking. Still can't exactly fault me on that. It's not easy to find the contextual blog post if this post doesn't easily say it's part of a series.

Still though, my expose is still relevant, those are some hard lines that can easily be gotten rid of if your functions were immutable and not part of a class.

Any internal private function is safe to use anywhere in the system as long as it's not attached to a class and it doesn't modify shared state. If your systems were modelled this way there would be no need to really think about modularization as your subroutines are already modular.

For example:

  class A:
     def constructor:
         //does a bunch of random shit

     def someMethodThatMutatesSomething() -> output




   class B:

       def someOtherFunctionThatNeedsClassA:
           //cannot call someMethodThatMutatesSomethingwithout doing "a bunch of random shit" or even possibly modifying or breaking something else. Modularity is harder to achieve with this pattern. 

versus:

   def somePureFunctionWithNoSideEffects(input) -> output

somePureFunctionWithNoSideEffectsabove does not need any hard lines of protection. There is zero need to use the antics of "deconstructing a monolith" if you structured things this way. Functions like this can be exposed publicly for use by anyone with literally zero issues.

Shared muteable state and side effects is really the key thing that breaks modularity. Everyone misses it and comes up with strange ways to improve modularity by using "walls" everywhere. It's like cutting my car in half from left to right with a wall and calling it "modularization." When you find out that the engine in front actually needs the gas tank in back then you'll realize that the wall only produces more problems.

[richardlblair]

I think what's really unfortunate here is you started pretty pointed in what you were saying, and you've stayed pointed. It reads as confrontational.

It's unfortunate because you make a good point. Pure functions do not get the attention they deserve. However, no one will read that because you just sound like you're attacking for no real reason.

I'm only saying this because if you're this way here there is a solid chance you're like that in other areas of your life. What you have to say is important, but if you approach your conversations this way people won't listen.

Why did I take the time to write this? Because sometimes those closest to us won't give us the feedback we need.

[leafboi]

Thanks. But this is the internet. I use a bit of aggression experimentally at times. Overall though, it sounds confrontational but I'm actually pretty factual and I never attacked anyone personally, it's all about the topic and idea. I actually admit when I'm wrong (see above, and who does that in life and on the internet?).

What's going on is I'm spending zero energy in attempting to massage the explanation with fake attempts to be nice. I'm just telling it like it is. Very few opportunities to do this in real life except on the internet.

In the company I work for do I spend time to tell my coworkers that pure functions are the key to modularity when classes and design patterns are ingrained in the culture? Do I tell them that their entire effort to move to microservices is motivated by hype and is really a horizontal objective with no actual benefit? No. I don't. People tend to dismiss things they don't agree with unless it's aggressively shoved in their face. They especially don't agree with ideas that go against the philosophies and and practices and they've been following for years and years.

Thus if I'm nice about it, I'm ignored, if I'm vocal and aggressive about it, I'm heard but it will also hurt my reputation. It's HN feel free to experiment just don't try it at work.

Yeah my attitude isn't the best, but honestly, if I was nice about it, less people would read this or think about it. By doing this on the internet I can raise a point while not ruining my rep. (And I'm not actually aggressive as there are no personal attacks unless someone said something personal about me)

Tell me, in your opinion, how would you get such a point across in a culture where the opposite is pretty ingrained? I'm down to try this, I can repost my original post with the errors corrected and a nicer tone to see the response.

[richardlblair]

I appreciate the point you're trying to make, but the truth is that you can make factual arguments without being so aggressive. Whether the aggression is targeted at a person doesn't really matter. It's unnecessary, disrespectful, and just feeds into the general toxicity that plagues our culture.

> Thus if I'm nice about it, I'm ignored, if I'm vocal and aggressive about it, I'm heard but it will also hurt my reputation.

I think the fact we are talking about your tone and not your points about functional programming speaks to this by itself. You weren't heard. You were felt, though.

> I'm not actually aggressive as there are no personal attacks

Aggression without a target is still aggression. If I aggressively take the recycling out, that aggression is still experienced by people around me. Probably my partner, who will inevitable have a little talk to me about it, lol.

> Tell me, in your opinion, how would you get such a point across in a culture where the opposite is pretty ingrained?

Engage in an intellectual conversion based off mutual respect. You will never change someones mind on the spot, intellectual people will often mull things over for a while. In the process you may learn a few things yourself. I've worked in places that excelled at this, where respectful discourse was promoted. Conversations revolved around facts, but respect was maintained.

Sidebar: Shopify doesn't really have microservices. They have a few services, but they are entire services which serve an entire business unit. They are the exception. When I worked there I worked on one such service. What I'd tell people is if you couldn't start a whole new company with the service you were building, don't build it as a service.

[leafboi]

I think you missed my point. I'm saying when you aren't aggressive people tend not to want to intellectually engage with you. People are emotional creatures and what doesn't excite them emotionally they don't engage. I'm saying I used the aggression on purpose for my own ends, but I caveated by saying that no actual attack occurred.

I think you need to think deeper than the traditional "mutual respect" attitude and generally being nice. Not all great leaders acted this way either. It's very nuanced and complicated how to get people to change or listen. The internet is an opportunity to try things out rather then take the safe uncomplicated "nice" way that we usually try in the workplace.

>Engage in an intellectual conversion based off mutual respect. You will never change someones mind on the spot, intellectual people will often mull things over for a while. In the process you may learn a few things yourself. I've worked in places that excelled at this, where respectful discourse was promoted. Conversations revolved around facts, but respect was maintained.

Right except this is exceedingly rare. Most people do not act this way. Respect was maintained but the point is instantly forgotten and dismissed. Likely the respect covers up actual misunderstanding or disagreement. I find actual intense arguments open people up to say what they mean rather than cover up everything in gift wrapping.

Think about this way. The reason why Trump won the election is not because he was nice. The complexities of human relationships goes deeper then just "mutual respect" There are other ways to make things move. The internet is often an opportunity for you to try the alternative methods without much risk.

>I think the fact we are talking about your tone and not your points about functional programming speaks to this by itself. You weren't heard. You were felt, though.

The world moves through feelings. Not for all cases but oftentimes to get heard you need to get "felt" first.

[modal-soul]

Just because a function is pure doesn't mean there is zero-risk in exposing it publicly. You're conflating complexity in managing state with complexity in managing domain boundaries.

A tangled web of function calls can be very confusing to work with, regardless of purity.

[leafboi]

From a purely structural standpoint there is no risk. But you are talking about something different. You use the word "confusion."

Confusion is an organizational issue that can be handled with social solutions like names, namespaces and things like that. You can compose functions to form higher order functions with proper naming to make sense of things. So for example if you have 30 primitive functions you can compose smaller components into 10 bigger functions in a higher layer and expose that as an api. This is more of a semantical thing as you can still use the lower level primitives as a library and chain those lower level functions to achieve the same goal as using the higher level api, the higher level functions just make it easier to reason about the complexity.

Confusion, Semantics and organization is in a sense a social issue that is solved by social solutions like proper naming, grouping and composing. I'm not dismissing these issues (they are important) but I'm saying they are in a different category.

Overall though the problem I am addressing is structural. There are real structural issues that occur if your functions are not pure. When 4 methods operate on shared state in a class all four methods become glued together. You cannot decompose or recompose these functions ever. They cannot be reused without instantiating all the baggage that comes with the class.

[mperham]

I don't think you need to mansplain architecture to the blog post author.

[leafboi]

You can't talk about modularity without touching on shared mutable state. Shared mutable state is the fundamental primitive that eliminates modularity. You get rid of this, you're entire program is now modular.

None of the writing really gets deep into this so I assume the author doesn't know.

It's not "mansplaining" you social justice warrior. I don't even know the sex of the author and I don't care. Don't turn this into some sex based conflict. It's called explaining, and that's all it is.

I'm assuming you don't know about it either so I suggest you read my "explanation" as well.