[akkartik]

Yeah, that's fair. The benefits of unit tests for me were always that they forced me to decompose the problem into testable/side-effect-free functions. But this thread is about questioning the value of that in the first place.

Just so long as the outer function is testable and side-effect-free.

[mercurial]

Say you have a system with components A and B. Functional tests let you have confidence that A works fine with B. The day you need to ensure A works with C, this confidence flies out of the window, because it's perfectly possible that functional tests pass solely because of a bug in B. It's not such a big issue if the surface of A and C is small, but writing comprehensive functional tests for a large, complex system can be daunting.

[mark-r]

The intro to the post has Carmack saying he now prefers to write code in a more functional style. That's exactly the side-effect-free paradigm you're looking for.

[_delirium]

Even most of the older post is focused on side-effecting functions. His main concern with the previous approach is that functions relied on outside-the-function context (global or quasi-global state is extremely common in game engines), and a huge source of bugs was that they would be called in a slightly different context than they expected. When functions depend so brittly on reading or even mutating outside state, I can see the advantage to the inline approach, where it's very carefully tracked what is done in which sequence, and what data it reads/changes, instead of allowing any of that to happen in a more "hidden" way in nests of function-call chains. If a function is pure, on the other hand, this kind of thing isn't a concern.