4 ms·

Exactly, 2/3 code reduction sounds so great that I would like to be able to see that.

• dkersten 12y ago
  I, too, would like to see examples. Though I will note that I recently saw some OO code written by a colleague that takes in a set of data names, runs a set of processes on them (translating the names to process-specific ids, fetching the data, turning it back into generic names) and then outputs it to one or more places. It was a pretty standard class hierarchy for reusing common code, selecting optional processing and so on. I've been spending a lot of time doing functional programming lately and would call myself a little bit of a functional programming enthusiast, so when I looked at the code, my first thought was that each of these parts are just functions that get passed into the appropriate places as higher order functions. Smaller, simpler and more flexible because you can customise what happens just by changing a function. It occurred to me that when I think about problems in a functional programming mindset, there really isn't a need for crazy class hierarchies at all, because they're really just a dispatch mechanism for code reuse, but higher order functions acting on pure data structures handle 90% of this just fine with very little work. The other 10% are the complex cases that FP solves using fancier techniques like pattern matching (in the simpler cases) or multimethods or something similar in the complex cases.
  • findjashua 12y ago
    "there really isn't a need for crazy class hierarchies at all, because they're really just a dispatch mechanism for code reuse, but higher order functions acting on pure data structures handle 90% of this just fine with very little work" You did a better job of putting my thoughts to words than I could.