Declarative Programming

I know that some folks swear by declarative programming. They like the ideas behind ant (and make) and SCons and related examples.

You can google for "ant v. maven v. gradle" where people gripe about which is more declarative. The point of the whining being that more declarative == good and any traces of procedural or imperative programming == bad.

All, of course, without any really good justification of why declarative is better. It's assumed that declarative simply has innumerable advantages. And yes, I've started with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming. The issue isn't simply moot; the justification is weak.

Perhaps there's a awful bias toward imperative and functional programming. After all, the big thinkers in computer science tend to favor the imperative and functional schools of thought. Maybe declarative suffers from some bias.

Or maybe declarative has limited utility.

There. I said it. Limited utility.

I think a functional approach might be better, faster and simpler.

Side-bar Ranting

The code is below. You can skip down to the "The Functional Build System" section and not miss much.

Declarative programming seems applicable to the cases where the ordering of operations can be easily deduced. It seems like the significant value of declarative programming is to rely on an optimizing compiler rearrange the declarations into properly-ordered imperative steps. From this viewpoint, it seems like ant/maven/gradle are optimizers that look at the dependencies among transformation functions and then apply the functions in the proper order.

It seems like we're writing expressions like these:

x.class = java(x.java)
xyz.jar = jar(x.class, y.class, z.class, ... )
app.war = war(xyz.jar, abc.jar, ... )

and then turning them over to a clever compiler (like Haskell) to work out a total order among the expressions that will build the right thing for us.

There's a potential difference between manually structuring a script to get all of the steps in order and allowing the compiler to arrange things properly based on some formal semantics behind each expression.

It's a potential difference because most folks that deal with ant/maven/gradle tend to put things in more-or-less the right order so that others can figure out what the hell is going on. In the trivial cases where we're building simple web sites, the default rules have evolved to the point where they work in almost all cases, so we don't even look at the configuration of the tools. We hit Ctrl+B knowing that it's all setup properly

Some Requirements

A number of applications have ant-like (or make-like) aspects but don't really cry out for ant with customized actions. We might be doing data warehouse loads which involve an ant-like sequence of processing steps to do transformations, loads, and produce final summaries and confirmations. We can, of course, write this all in first-class Java code. The hard way.

It's not terribly complex. A class to define a dependency. A suite of plug-in strategies. Some static definitions of the actual rules. Been there. Done that.

Pragmatically, the declarative style suffers from a limitation of being rather rigid in applying a fixed set of rules. A more script-like implementation can be more helpful to support reruns, debugging, problem-solving and the inevitable special cases and exceptions. After a storage failure -- and the reruns required to get the warehouse back up-to-date -- one sees more need for script-like flexibility and less need for overly simplistic rigidity.

Another end of the spectrum is individual steps all manually coordinated with a tool like BMC's Control-M. This requires endless manual intervention to make sure all the various tasks are defined properly in Control-M.

Somewhere near the middle is a configurable application with some processing rules to give it flexibility. But some defined structure to remove the need for carefully planned manual intervention and deep expertise.

The Functional Build System

We can image an ant-like build system defined functionally.

The core is a function that implements build-if-needed rules:

def build_if_needed( builder, target_file, *source ):
    if target_ok( target_file, *source ):
        return "ok({0},...)".format(target_file)
    builder( target_file, *source )
    return "{0}({1},...)".format(builder.__class__.__name__,target_file)

We can use this function to define the essential dependency: use a builder function to create some target if it's out-of-date with respect to the sources. The return value forms a kind of audit log.

This relies on some helper functions: target_ok() checks the modification times of files. The various builders do the various kinds of operations required to make one from the sources.

Here's the target_ok() function

def target_ok( target_file, *source_list, logger=logging ):
    try:
        mtime_target= datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(
            os.path.getmtime( target_file ) )
    except Exception:
        return False
    # If a source doesn't exist, we throw an exception.
    times = (datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(
            os.path.getmtime( source ) ) for source in source_list)
    return all(mtime_target > mtime_source for mtime_source in times)

I think this function is what started me thinking about a functional approach. It could be a method of a class. But. It's seems like a very functional design. It could be reduced to a single (long) expression.

The builders are composite functions. They need to combine the subprocess.check_call() with a function that builds the command. We can do functional composition several ways in Python: we can combine functions via decorators. We can also combine functions via Callables. We could write a higher-order function that combines the check_call() with a function to create the command.

We'll opt for the higher-order function and create partially evaluated forms using functools.partial().

Here's a typical case:

def subprocess_builder( make_command, target_file, *source_list ):
    command= make_command( target_file, *source_list )
    subprocess.check_call( command )

This is a generic function: it requires a function (or lambda) to build the actual command. We might do something like this to create a specific builder.

def command_rst2html( output, *input ):
        return ["rst2html.py", "--syntax-highlight=long", "--input-encoding=utf-8", input[0], output]

rst2html= partial( subprocess_builder, command_rst2html )

This rst2html() function can be used to define a dependency rule. We might have something like this:

    files_txt = glob.glob( "*.txt" )
    for f in files_txt:
        build_if_needed( rst2html, ext_to(f,'.html'), f )

This rule specifies that *.html files depend on *.txt files; when needed, use the rst2html() function to build the required html file when the txt file is newer.

The ext_to() function is a two-liner that changes the extension on a filename. This helps us write "template" build rules rather than exhaustively enumerating a large number of similar files.

def ext_to( filename, new_ext ):
    name, ext = os.path.splitext( filename )
    return name + new_ext

What we've done here is define a few generic functions that form the basis for a functional build system that can compete against ant, make or scons. The system is not even close to declarative. However, we only need to assure that our final build_if_needed() functions have a sensible ordering, something that's rarely a towering intellectual burden.

The individual customizations are the build commands like rst2html() where we created the command-line list of strings for subprocess.check_call(). We can just as easily build functions which run entirely in the process or functions which farm the work out to separate processes via queues or RESTful web services.

Bottom Lines

It appears that declarative programming isn't terribly helpful. There may be a niche, but it seems to be a small niche to me.

I'm sure that an object-oriented approach to this problem isn't any better. I've written a shabby-make version of this, and it's bigger. There's just more code and it's not significantly more clear what's going on. Inheritance can be difficult to suss out.

Python seems to be a good functional programming language. It did this very nicely.