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by AnimalMuppet 4025 days ago
I read recently (in another article here on HN) a quote from Adele Goldberg that in OO, "everything happens somewhere else". This was not meant as a compliment to the OO approach.

Your approach seems to be "the IO happens somewhere else". I'm not sure that that's much more of a compliment.
1 comments
ignorabilis 4025 days ago
I/O is someone else's code, not yours. So it's someone else's responsibility to test it. You should just test the arguments that you pass (in case they are generated) and trust that the I/O is properly tested by its author.

In OOP everything happens somewhere else because anything can hold a reference to the variable and change its value right under your nose.

To me at least these are two different concepts.

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AnimalMuppet 4025 days ago
Why is I/O always somebody else's code? (In my world, it's definitely not always somebody else's code, but I'm in embedded systems, which is an unusual environment.)

I mean, somebody has to be the "somebody else". What if it's you? Now you have to properly test the I/O code. (If you can get away with it never being you, that's fine, for you. Other people might not have that freedom, though.)

> In OOP everything happens somewhere else because anything can hold a reference to the variable and change its value right under your nose.

You're referring to a variable changing when it shouldn't. I don't think that's what the quote means. In OOP everything happens somewhere else because there's always another layer of indirection, and so the code that should change the variable isn't in the function (or file) that you're reading. This is why I say it's similar to your approach - the I/O is never in the function that you're reading. It still has to be somewhere, though. And the same thing that OOP does to the details of the computation (move it somewhere else), your approach does to the details of the I/O - it's not where you're looking, it's scattered somewhere else. For the same reason people complain about the effect of OOP in this regard, I distrust your approach for the I/O.

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ignorabilis 4024 days ago
In OOP everything happens somewhere else because there's always another layer of indirection, and so the code that should change the variable isn't in the function (or file) that you're reading. - and because of that when you are debugging it may change right under your nose, with no code obviously responsible for that. There is a nuance, but the idea is the same - only the context is different. It's just that when you are debugging it hurts the most.

In the context of the article I/O is someone else's code. If it were my code it should be tested elsewhere, as if someone else wrote it. Not in every place that my application uses it.

In the particular case with writing the actual I/O code - I don't have enough experience, so I can't tell you. Maybe tests are absolutely necessary. Maybe mocks are the only way. I don't know.

What I do know is that programs transform input to output - input -> transformations -> output. You never care where the input comes from nor where the result of your transformations go. All you care is if your transformations are correct.

Your program may be very complex, with many inputs that you don't control, scattered around your logic. So prior to writing tests you have to decouple those dependencies from your logic and only then proceed with writing tests. If you are using functional language you may reduce every piece of logic to the simplest, smallest function possible, test it in the REPL, document it and move on without actually writing tests.

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