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I don't do Haskell, but I have worked on projects with lots of small functions, and one of the problems with that is that can be... too many functions. You have

I don't do Haskell, but I have worked on projects with lots of small functions, and one of the problems with that is that can be... too many functions. You have to go look up three functions every time you read a block of code. Worse, people start writing the same functions over and over again. There's probably a bigger picture problem and fix in that kind of situation, but it is something I think about.

JoshTriplett 10y ago
> You have to go look up three functions every time you read a block of code. When you write small, single-purpose functions, you can make them fairly self-documenting with the name alone. If you have to look up a one-line function, it probably doesn't have a very clear function or name. > Worse, people start writing the same functions over and over again. That one I've definitely run into. > There's probably a bigger picture problem and fix in that kind of situation, but it is something I think about. Mechanisms to search functions by type ("find me a function that takes an X and returns a Y") help quite a bit.
- mrkgnao 10y ago
  Conventions also help. For instance, the lazy readTVar, modifyTVar, etc. functions have strict analogs called readTVar' and so on. mapM, foldM, replicateM, and traverse return a monadic value, while mapM_, foldM_, replicateM_, traverse_ and friends discard the return value (giving an m () instead of an m a).
- Silhouette 10y ago
  When you write small, single-purpose functions, you can make them fairly self-documenting with the name alone. Sometimes, although with languages like Haskell there can be a related problem that accurate names for these small functions wind up being almost as long, or even longer, than their definitions.
- astrobe_ 10y ago
  Pharo/Squeak (and probably other Smalltalk systems) have a utility that let you find a function given a set of input/output examples.
  - krakensden 10y ago
    Do you have a name/link? That sounds fascinating.

JoshTriplett 10y ago

> You have to go look up three functions every time you read a block of code. When you write small, single-purpose functions, you can make them fairly self-documenting with the name alone. If you have to look up a one-line function, it probably doesn't have a very clear function or name. > Worse, people start writing the same functions over and over again. That one I've definitely run into. > There's probably a bigger picture problem and fix in that kind of situation, but it is something I think about. Mechanisms to search functions by type ("find me a function that takes an X and returns a Y") help quite a bit.

mrkgnao 10y ago
Conventions also help. For instance, the lazy readTVar, modifyTVar, etc. functions have strict analogs called readTVar' and so on. mapM, foldM, replicateM, and traverse return a monadic value, while mapM_, foldM_, replicateM_, traverse_ and friends discard the return value (giving an m () instead of an m a).
Silhouette 10y ago
When you write small, single-purpose functions, you can make them fairly self-documenting with the name alone. Sometimes, although with languages like Haskell there can be a related problem that accurate names for these small functions wind up being almost as long, or even longer, than their definitions.
astrobe_ 10y ago
Pharo/Squeak (and probably other Smalltalk systems) have a utility that let you find a function given a set of input/output examples.
- krakensden 10y ago
  Do you have a name/link? That sounds fascinating.