Replying to Avatar jb55

I've been coding for 26 years. if I could distill my experience into one sentence it would be:

"functions and data is all you need"

don't get distracted by fancy language features. every language has functions, every language has structs. mastering programming is just composing functions and transforming data. once you master this you can program in any language.

if you focus building programs as small, pure, modular functions that operate on *only* the data it needs, then you will have a large set of functions that are highly composable. you will never have to do large rewrites of your program, because your program will compose of lego blocks that you can snap together in different ways.

gm nostr!
Avatar
semisol 8mo ago

I have started doing something like this in the last year and it has been nothing but great

everything is modular, dependency injection if anything is needed, shared-almost-nothing

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Avatar
jb55 8mo ago

haskell also teaches you another important lesson: most of your program can be pure functions that do not mutate anything, they purely transform data from input A to output B. A program is simply a machine that is mapping and reducing data over some time.

For side effects, like reading from db/files or writing to a socket, you can do this in a small impure layer at the top your program. This layer just builds values so that they can be passed through the pure machinery.

The pure code can’t really crash due to total pattern matching, so it is nice for super robust programs.