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Right... Another fad brought up for the sheer fashionability of it. Saying "mutable state is bad" is just as inane as saying "immutability is bad". There are

Right... Another fad brought up for the sheer fashionability of it. Saying "mutable state is bad" is just as inane as saying "immutability is bad". There are tradeoffs for either. There is absolutely no reason to pretend that one trumps the other in all cases. Other than looking cool to your peers, I guess.

yellowapple 11y ago
Nobody's "pretending" that immutability trumps mutability. Rather, we're observing it firsthand. By making immutability the rule rather than the exception thereof, one eliminates a huge swath of bugs and makes an even bigger swatch much more difficult to achieve. That said, you're right that there are tradeoffs, which is why languages like Rust - while defaulting to immutability - allow a programmer to define variables as mutable, and why Elixir (unlike Erlang) allows variables to be reassigned (though the data stored in those variables is still immutable; this is something that's enforced by BEAM). And of course, you can still get many of the benefits of immutability with mutable variables by being careful about how you're using those variables; the difference, however, is that a language which assumes immutability will be able to catch those bugs more easily, forcing the programmer to fix them (either by making the variable mutable (in applicable languages) or refactoring until mutability isn't necessary).
lectrick 11y ago
I spent over 10 years writing and working on (and debugging... many hours of debugging) Ruby code. Towards the end I started to write all my Ruby code, as much as possible, as so-called PORO objects (Plain Ol' Ruby Objects). These feature zero inheritance, and are initialized with all the state they need to do their work. I started doing this because I found that writing code that way produced more easily testable, more maintainable, more stable code. Then I realized that functional languages basically all already forced you to do those things, by not holding state anywhere, forcing you to pass it around. These were all logical steps (with the end goal optimization of "useless work elimination"). There was no faddiness involved, other than having "a good feeling" about working with Elixir (over, say, Clojure, Haskell or the other options out there).

yellowapple 11y ago

Nobody's "pretending" that immutability trumps mutability. Rather, we're observing it firsthand. By making immutability the rule rather than the exception thereof, one eliminates a huge swath of bugs and makes an even bigger swatch much more difficult to achieve. That said, you're right that there are tradeoffs, which is why languages like Rust - while defaulting to immutability - allow a programmer to define variables as mutable, and why Elixir (unlike Erlang) allows variables to be reassigned (though the data stored in those variables is still immutable; this is something that's enforced by BEAM). And of course, you can still get many of the benefits of immutability with mutable variables by being careful about how you're using those variables; the difference, however, is that a language which assumes immutability will be able to catch those bugs more easily, forcing the programmer to fix them (either by making the variable mutable (in applicable languages) or refactoring until mutability isn't necessary).

lectrick 11y ago

I spent over 10 years writing and working on (and debugging... many hours of debugging) Ruby code. Towards the end I started to write all my Ruby code, as much as possible, as so-called PORO objects (Plain Ol' Ruby Objects). These feature zero inheritance, and are initialized with all the state they need to do their work. I started doing this because I found that writing code that way produced more easily testable, more maintainable, more stable code. Then I realized that functional languages basically all already forced you to do those things, by not holding state anywhere, forcing you to pass it around. These were all logical steps (with the end goal optimization of "useless work elimination"). There was no faddiness involved, other than having "a good feeling" about working with Elixir (over, say, Clojure, Haskell or the other options out there).