Hacker News Reader

Comment by kitsune_ | Hacker News Reader

Mutable state can be a huge pain in the ass. A common mistake OOP beginners, and even "experienced" developers, make is the creation of this complex jungle of entangled objects that all directly or indirectly manipulate each other's internal states. If you've ever had to work with such a code base for a prolonged amount of time you are pretty quickly ripe for a year-long sabbatical. There is simply no way to reason about the control flow and state of the program without investing a lot of time and mental effort. Sometimes it's almost impossible.

I don't know, I think it's a point where education fails. Your average enterprise developer should be forced to read books like "Clean Code" by Bob Martin before being allowed to touch a keyboard.

View on HN

>> Mutable state can be a huge pain in the ass [..] 8I don't know, I think it's a point where education fails*

I'd argue that the problem with software quality is not so much in the (ab)use of mutable state, but the fact that (especially in enterprises) software often reflects the organizational structure of the people who worked on it.

Exhibit A: the software solution where every tiny part of the system is developed by some (semi) random group of people that often changes, doesn't directly communicate with any of the other groups, doesn't bother to much with the 'architecture' of the complete system (a big ball of mud), and has no interest improving either the overall architecture of the system, or any of the components outside their scope. Add pervasive mutable state into this mix, and you have a recipe for disaster.

That's not to say the mantra 'eliminate (almost) all forms of mutable state' will improve this problem much.

>> Immutable state can be a huge pain in the ass. A common mistake FP beginners, and even "experienced" developers, make is the creation of this complex jungle of entangled functions.

See what I did there.

The analogy would be that those functions are mutually recursive and while mutual recursive functions can be an elegant solution to several problems (state machine, some algorithms)overuse is not a mistake i have seen very often. FP does coerce, or at least very strongly suggests, a very simple program structure. This makes it hard to model some more complex relationships that are easy in OO. Anyway, my point is that FP is indeed different in this regard compared to OO.

My main point was that bad code exists in all paradigms. If there were a perfect language or paradigm, everybody would be using it and there would be no such debate. Immutability is not necessarily good or bad, same for mutability. We should all do a better job at explaining to beginning programmers how to use all paradigms appropriately, and how to choose among them. And of course, to use vi.

Why should I use vi? Why wouldn't this decision be similar to what paradigm I choose?

It was a joke. Emacs vs. Vi, FP vs OOP, etc. All members of the set of useless debate topics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com