[POiNTx]

In Elixir this would be written as:

  db.getUsers()
  |> getExpiredUsers(Date.now())
  |> generateExpiryEmails()
  |> email.bulkSend()

I think Elixir hits the nail on the head when it comes to finding the right balance between functional and imperative style code.

[time4tea]

Not a single person in this thread commented on the use of Date.now() and similar - surely clock.now() - you never ever want to use global time in any code, how could you test it?

clock in this case is a thing that was supplied to the class or function. It could just be a function: () -> Instant.

(Setting a global mock clock is too evil, so don't suggest that!)

[POiNTx]

I was just referring to how pipes make these kinds of chained function calls more readable. But on your point, I think using Date.now() is perfectly ok.

[ruszki]

> I think using Date.now() is perfectly ok.

This is why we have tests which we need to update every 3 months, because somebody said this. This is of course, after a ton of research went into finding out why the heck our tests broke suddenly.

[Izkata]

I would call those badly-written tests. The current date/time exists outside the system and ought to be acceptable for mocks, and in python we have things like freezegun that make it easy to control without the usual pitfalls of mocks.

[ruszki]

What are those mock pitfalls, which are avoided by freezegun which is a mock according even to them? IoC and Clocks solve the same problem. So what are the pitfalls of using those instead of this other mock?

[Izkata]

Applying it to the wrong module, a very common mistake in python due to how imports work.

[vlovich123]

What happens during a daylight savings adjustment?

[POiNTx]

You use UTC which doesn't adjust daylight savings.

[MarkMarine]

nit picking on the example code while missing the example the code was trying to demonstrate. I see why TAOCP used pseudocode

[time4tea]

Agreed! But i didnt miss the example.... i also thought it was interesting that all the various examples of declarative or applicative did Date.now(), which i see as a big thing to avoid.

[montebicyclelo]

    bulk_send(
        generate_expiry_email(user) 
        for user in db.getUsers() 
        if is_expired(user, date.now())
    )

(...Just another flavour of syntax to look at)

[whichdan]

The nice thing with the Elixir example is that you can easily `tap()` to inspect how the data looks at any point in the pipeline. You can also easily insert steps into the pipeline, or reuse pipeline steps. And due to the way modules are usually organized, it would more realistically read like this, if we were in a BulkEmails module:

  Users.all()
  |> Enum.filter(&Users.is_expired?(&1, Date.utc_today()))
  |> Enum.map(&generate_expiry_email/1)
  |> tap(&IO.inspect(label: "Expiry Email"))
  |> Enum.reject(&is_nil/1)
  |> bulk_send()

The nice thing here is that we can easily log to the console, and also filter out nil expiry emails. In production code, `generate_expiry_email/1` would likely return a Result (a tuple of `{:ok, email}` or `{:error, reason}`), so we could complicate this a bit further and collect the errors to send to a logger, or to update some flag in the db.

It just becomes so easy to incrementally add functionality here.

---

Quick syntax reference for anyone reading:

- Pipelines apply the previous result as the first argument of the next function

- The `/1` after a function name indicates the arity, since Elixir supports multiple dispatch

- `&fun/1` expands to `fn arg -> fun(arg) end`

- `&fun(&1, "something")` expands to `fn arg -> fun(arg, "something") end`

[Akronymus]

Not sure I like how the binding works for user in this example, but tbh, I don't really have any better idea.

Writing custom monad syntax is definitely quite a nice benefit of functional languages IMO.