Ep 094: Concrete Composition

Functional Design in Clojure

Each week, we discuss a different topic about Clojure and functional programming.

If you have a question or topic you'd like us to discuss, tweet @clojuredesign, send an email to [email protected], or join the #clojuredesign-podcast channel on the Clojurians Slack.

This week, the topic is: "decomposition." We help our code through a breakup so it can find its true colors.

Our discussion includes:

• How to process text and add color.
• When is it time to decompose?
• Return of the box mix!
• How to separate transformation from I/O.
• How to use reducing functions to repeat computation.
• What makes code orthogonal?
• The woes of packing useful data into bits.
• Signs of complexity in the Java underlayer.
• What is the difference between isolation and decomposition?
• What are some natural points of separation?

Selected quotes:

• "We are composing ourselves!"
• "I'm a terminal guy, so this is all in the terminal."
• "You can go look it up on the Internet. I'm not going to try to speak ANSI right now."
• "The box mix makes it really easy to make a cake, but it also constricts your ability to do more things with it."
• "By definition, any side effect is an orthogonal concern."
• "It's screaming for decomposition!"
• "Separating these out makes it so that it's easier to understand each part by itself."
• "We have our 'actual code' badge again as a programming podcast!"

Links:

• Ep 093: Waffle Cakes
• Ep 031: Eager Abstraction
• Ep 033: Cake or Ice Cream? Yes!