| Functional Programming debugging is often "REPL-guided" in a way that imperative programming often is not. This is not unique to functional programming, though. Even the (mostly) imperative languages Python and Javascript you may be more likely to use REPLs of one sort or another (Python shells, browser consoles, Node/Deno/Bun shells, notebooks, etc.) as your first layer of debugging. There are interesting trade-offs in REPL-oriented debugging. One of the big things is that in a language like C you might often start first from whole program debugging and breakpoints to try to hit exactly where you think the problem is. In a REPL-oriented world you often try to build the components of your program in a way that you can test more units of it directly in the REPL. Your module/API/Type boundaries in a REPL world become to mirror your debuggability story. There is sometimes more pressure to get those right and easy to use than in imperative languages like C/C++ because you might want to reach for them directly in a REPL. But yes, a tradeoff versus whole program-first debugging is sometimes it becomes harder to isolate complex integration issues between your units in strange real world scenarios. However, that REPL-first approach is often encouraging of minimizing your integration "surface" to a bare minimum so often FP languages don't exhibit some of the same integration effects you see in imperative languages. > Harder to do when the language goes out of its way to hide the state from you, as it is the case for functional programming. Functional programming languages aren't really hiding any state from you. They also are running on imperative hardware and still dealing with real hardware states. At some point there is a translation between the "worlds" (which also likely aren't as different as you seem to think that they are). You still have those imperative breakpoints and imperative debuggers to fallback on. That's why the term is "REPL-guided" debugging. You can use a REPL to pinpoint the problematic unit (the exact module/API/function) and the problematic input giving you the surprise output. If you can't see the bug in the source as written you can still send it to an imperative debugger and watch nearly the same "line-by-line" experience and hope it provides additional missing context. Even better by that point you probably don't need to choose good "breakpoints" because you've already isolated the problem enough in the REPL to have "natural breakpoints" because the unit you are debugging may be small and narrow enough that stepping just that unit is all you need. > It is interesting that the longest section of the article is about this problem: "design for introspection", where the author has to go out of his way to make his code debuggable. I think you found the wrong message from that section. That section wasn't about debuggability it was about observability. It was about connecting logging/telemetry systems correctly, mocking fakes during testing, adding retries/circuit-breakers at a systematic/app-wide level rather than relying on individual libraries to get it right. In the imperative world these aren't debugging issues either: These are Dependency Injection issues. These are Middleware installing issues. These are factoring concerns like using Abstract Interfaces over Concrete Classes at your public API boundary. The design suggestions are factorings. They don't impact debuggability, they impact how easy it is to install observability middleware to someone else's public API. |