# Purity, Types, and Other Functional Nonsense

A while ago the topic of lenses came up in one of the chatrooms at work. This led to a discussion on the (ahem) suboptimal readability of advanced functional programming code examples, and how a lot of the fancier constructs are by-products of being super hardcore about purity. This led to me writing a great big email to the team that generated a whole bunch of thoughtful discussion on FP, complexity, and straw men with free lunches. I was also told I should transcribe to blog form, so here it is reproduced (mostly) faithfully:

I’ve been digging into Haskell/etc a bunch lately and have hit some similar pain points. Typeclasses and Haskell-specific syntax aside, I think one of the biggest mental shifts I have experienced is learning to reason based on types alone. Full disclaimer: I am by no means an expert on any of this. But since I am (at the original time of writing) sitting in an airport with a mildly disgruntled cat, I figure I may as well write up a blurb about my experiences on purity, types, and what can follow from it.

### A Brave New World

So for the rest of this email, let’s suspend our disbelief and imagine that we have an “ideal functional” Scala that is pure and strongly typed. This means no:

• null
• exceptions
• type-casting (e.g. asInstanceOf, isInstanceOf)
• side-effects (e.g. println, cw.track(metric))
• Object (e.g. anything.toString)

### A simple example

Given the above, consider a function with this signature:

nonsense is parameterized on the type A, which could be any type. This means that the implementation of nonsense knows literally nothing about its input—It could be a number, a list, an Option, a String, or anything else we can think of passing in. Because we’re living in this imaginary world where null, etc do not exist, nonsense literally cannot do anything with its argument except return it.

Following this logic, we can deduce that nonsense is just the identity function based on its type signature alone. It doesn’t matter if it is called nonsense or foo or id, or if its argument is named i, j, k. We don’t even have to look at the implementation. Given the type A => A, this function literally cannot do anything other than return its argument, or else it would not have compiled. (Again, this is assuming no null, println, etc).

Extending this slightly, this function:

can only have two possible implementations based on its type: def c[A](i: A, j: A) = i, or def c[A](i: A, j: A) = j. Likewise, def c2[A, B](i: A, j: B): B can only => j, and so on.

### A structured example

Now consider the function:

Without looking at the function name, the implementation, and so on, what can we deduce about nonsense2 in our imaginary magical world? The output never contains any element that was not in the input. That is, the output could be the input itself, it could be input reversed, it could be the input sliced up—but you will never have a situation where e.g. nonsense2(List(1)) == List(2) or nonsense2(List(1)) == List(List("XYZ")). To put it another way, just based on the type signature of List[A] => List[A], we know that the function may do something to the List structure but nothing will happen to the individual As–or else the code would not have compiled.

This type of reasoning can be applied to basically any function to derive information about it (guess what this function is: def fff[A, B](f: A => List[B], i: List[A]): List[B]). By maintaining strict typing and purity, we give up the convenience of things like side-effects and run-time type-matching. But in exchange, we get increased ability to reason about (and have a sufficiently smart compiler prove) certain properties of our code, regardless of potentially misleading/outdated evidence such as function names and comments. The big idea here is to 1) shift as much of the “thinking” to the compiler as possible to reduce the potential for human error, and 2) lock as much down during compile-time as possible to reduce the potential surface area of run-time errors.

### Real life

Sadly, real life is messy and not everything can be proved at compile time. Even in fff above, the implementation could be e.g. flatMap or flatMap andThen reverse or just Nil.

As another example, consider:

Based on the types, we can say that the potential output of intNonsense is constrained to the size of the set of possible Ints; i.e., there are 232 possible outputs. Other than that though, we can’t say much about the function’s implementation(*). It could double its input, add 1 to its input, negate its input, negate its input but only if it’s even, and so on.

So what’s a programmer to do?

(*) - Without some fancy pants type-level probably-church-encoded something-something-something sort of programming, but that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms that I haven’t gotten remotely close to opening…

### Tests!

One natural reaction would be to start writing some unit tests to make sure this function does what we think it does. So we start writing some tests:

And from that we may think that intNonsense == identity. Except that with the above suite, the following could still happen, and we would be wrong:

We could also test the totality of the mapping between input and output to intNonsense. But even for a simple Int => Int function, that would be a total of 232 possible inputs, and I feel like even the most determined programmer would give up after a couple hundred. Or maybe not, and more power to you. :)

One way to help with this is properties-based testing, which I think has been discussed before. Props-based testing frameworks come in various levels of sophistication, but the basic idea is that instead of writing tests for a single case, you write a general “property” for your function and the framework will generate a whole bunch of kinda-random input to throw at it. As an example in ScalaCheck, a property for string concatenation might look something like:

This is not perfect, but it still lends itself to far more robustness-per-effort when compared to individual unit tests. In some cases, it is even more readable as far as communicating what you want to be true about your code.

Of course, props-based testing can be used with the most imperative mutable-state-having code, but when combined with pure compiler-friendly code it can end up really reducing the potential for unexpected errors.

### Disclaimers

Wrapping up, a couple of disclaimers.

1) If we take the idea of using types/etc in this way another step further, we might draw the conclusion that function names and documentation are relatively meaningless next to what you can prove with the compiler. This is one argument I’ve heard re: scalaz’s lack of concern about approachability in its API naming + docs. “We don’t need a docstring, from the types there is only one possible implementation of this function, so it’s self-explanatory”. If we take this idea all the way to the extreme, we might even argue that concrete names are harmful since they propagate impressions about the code that can potentially be outdated or false. This should sound familiar to anyone who has read, say, Tony Morris.

FWIW, I tend to come down on the side of “why not both”? I love the idea of catching more mistakes at build-time by fully leveraging a smart compiler and better tests, and I do agree (at least in principle) that maintaining purity also makes composability easier. But at the same time, I don’t really see the harm in calling an argument zero to declare its intentions, regardless of whether we can fully prove it in the code. To play devil’s advocate again though, I do agree that sometimes names are vestigial and you have to depend on the types. For example, I’ve tried and failed to think of a better name than f for the argument A => List[B] in flatMap.

2) Approaching this from another angle, one can also write code using nothing but the types, or what I like to call “playing type jigsaw.” IMO it’s pretty fun to just write out a bunch of type signatures and almost-kinda-auto-pilot your way through until it compiles—but it can get really meta, and I have only had limited experience in playing around with this style of programming. The furthest I have taken it is trying to reconstruct twitter’s Stitch as a natural transformation to Future, and most of the other stuff I’ve played with has been small and isolated—think Project Euler style problems. Which is to say that I’ve explored this stuff on the side, but in practice for a large enough system I have no idea if it’s e.g. just trading one type of complexity for another. Though intuitively I feel like enterprise code (i.e., large systems, many inputs/outputs, lots of complex logic) is where leveraging a strongly typed functional style with a smart compiler could really be useful in the long run.

### Takeaways

Funnily enough, the most widely actionable takeaway from all of this is completely unrelated to types and naming and all of that. The one thing I feel that everyone can benefit from immediately is to use more quickcheck/properties-based testing. While it is not perfect, it sure beats enumerating things on a case-by-case basis. Plus–I forget where I read this–“nothing scares bugs out of your code like having something feed it pathologically bad values”.

Aside from that… I am not immediately hopping onto the HARDCORE PURITY train, but hopefully this at least gives some food for thought as far as another approach to writing and thinking about code.