Is there a software-engineering methodology for functional programming? [closed]

Answer 1

Thank God that the software-engineering people have not yet discovered functional programming. Here are some parallels:

• Many OO "design patterns" are captured as higher-order functions. For example, the Visitor pattern is known in the functional world as a "fold" (or if you are a pointy-headed theorist, a "catamorphism"). In functional languages, data types are mostly trees or tuples, and every tree type has a natural catamorphism associated with it.

  These higher-order functions often come with certain laws of programming, aka "free theorems".

• Functional programmers use diagrams much less heavily than OO programmers. Much of what is expressed in OO diagrams is instead expressed in types, or in "signatures", which you should think of as "module types". Haskell also has "type classes", which is a bit like an interface type.

  Those functional programmers who use types generally think that "once you get the types right; the code practically writes itself."

  Not all functional languages use explicit types, but the How To Design Programs book, an excellent book for learning Scheme/Lisp/Clojure, relies heavily on "data descriptions", which are closely related to types.

So what is the methodology for a systematic (model-based ?) design of a functional application, i.e. in Lisp or Clojure?

Any design method based on data abstraction works well. I happen to think that this is easier when the language has explicit types, but it works even without. A good book about design methods for abstract data types, which is easily adapted to functional programming, is Abstraction and Specification in Program Development by Barbara Liskov and John Guttag, the first edition. Liskov won the Turing award in part for that work.

Another design methodology that is unique to Lisp is to decide what language extensions would be useful in the problem domain in which you are working, and then use hygienic macros to add these constructs to your language. A good place to read about this kind of design is Matthew Flatt's article Creating Languages in Racket. The article may be behind a paywall. You can also find more general material on this kind of design by searching for the term "domain-specific embedded language"; for particular advice and examples beyond what Matthew Flatt covers, I would probably start with Graham's On Lisp or perhaps ANSI Common Lisp.

What are the common steps, what artifacts do I use?

Common steps:

1. Identify the data in your program and the operations on it, and define an abstract data type representing this data.

2. Identify common actions or patterns of computation, and express them as higher-order functions or macros. Expect to take this step as part of refactoring.

3. If you're using a typed functional language, use the type checker early and often. If you're using Lisp or Clojure, the best practice is to write function contracts first including unit tests—it's test-driven development to the max. And you will want to use whatever version of QuickCheck has been ported to your platform, which in your case looks like it's called ClojureCheck. It's an extremely powerful library for constructing random tests of code that uses higher-order functions.

Answer 2

OO programming tightly couples data with behavior. Functional programming separates the two. So you don't have class diagrams, but you do have data structures, and you particularly have algebraic data types. Those types can be written to very tightly match your domain, including eliminating impossible values by construction.

So there aren't books and books on it, but there is a well established approach to, as the saying goes, make impossible values unrepresentable.

In so doing, you can make a range of choices about representing certain types of data as functions instead, and conversely, representing certain functions as a union of data types instead so that you can get, e.g., serialization, tighter specification, optimization, etc.

Then, given that, you write functions over your adts such that you establish some sort of algebra -- i.e. there are fixed laws which hold for these functions. Some are maybe idempotent -- the same after multiple applications. Some are associative. Some are transitive, etc.

Now you have a domain over which you have functions which compose according to well behaved laws. A simple embedded DSL!

Oh, and given properties, you can of course write automated randomized tests of them (ala QuickCheck).. and that's just the beginning.

Answer 3

Honestly if you want design recipes for functional programs, take a look at the standard function libraries such as Haskell's Prelude. In FP, patterns are usually captured by higher order procedures (functions that operate on functions) themselves. So if a pattern is seen, often a higher order function is simply created to capture that pattern.

A good example is fmap. This function takes a function as an argument and applies it to all the "elements" of the second argument. Since it is part of the Functor type class, any instance of a Functor (such as a list, graph, etc...) may be passed as a second argument to this function. It captures the general behavior of applying a function to every element of its second argument.

Answer 4

I've recently found this book: Functional and Reactive Domain Modeling

I think is perfectly in line with your question.

From the book description:

Functional and Reactive Domain Modeling teaches you how to think of the domain model in terms of pure functions and how to compose them to build larger abstractions. You will start with the basics of functional programming and gradually progress to the advanced concepts and patterns that you need to know to implement complex domain models. The book demonstrates how advanced FP patterns like algebraic data types, typeclass based design, and isolation of side-effects can make your model compose for readability and verifiability.

Answer 5

While this might be considered naive and simplistic, I think "design recipes" (a systematic approach to problem solving applied to programming as advocated by Felleisen et al. in their book HtDP) would be close to what you seem to be looking for.

Here, a few links:

http://www.northeastern.edu/magazine/0301/programming.html

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.86.8371

Answer 6

Object Oriented design isn't the same thing as software engineering. Software engineering has to do with the entire process of how we go from requirements to a working system, on time and with a low defect rate. Functional programming may be different from OO, but it does not do away with requirements, high level and detailed designs, verification and testing, software metrics, estimation, and all that other "software engineering stuff".

Furthermore, functional programs do exhibit modularity and other structure. Your detailed designs have to be expressed in terms of the concepts in that structure.