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Does functional programming eliminate glue code? Is the sidewinder motion of the Turing machine the font of quadratic coding jobs?

• dhosek 5y ago
  Nope, The author's view of glue code is that most of it is to make the data output by function A a usable input for function B. This varies from the trivial (I'm moving an integer from A to B. Piece of cake as long as A & B both have the same sized integer with the same endianness and we've defined what to do if A is outputting a 64-bit value while B is inputting a 32-bit value and A sends something that doesn't fit in 32 bits) to the nightmarish (a large, poorly documented binary blob with inconsistent protocols) to lots of stuff in-between. Programming is easy. Data is hard.
  • cratermoon 5y ago
    > as long as A & B both have the same sized integer with the same endianness and we've defined what to do if A is outputting a 64-bit value while B is inputting a 32-bit value and A sends something that doesn't fit in 32 bits Well put. I still remember the time I helped a junior colleague debug an error (in C) simply by suggesting he look at the size of the types he was computing. Lightbulbs went off.
• xedrac 5y ago
  In Haskell, monads are all about composition of types. While the glue code doesn't go away, it stays neatly in the bind operator's definition for a given monad, which makes the rest of the code compose very easily. So no, it doesn't eliminate it, but I think it makes it a lot more manageable.
• cerved 5y ago
  No but it tends to enforce patterns that makes it a lot more manageable.