OOP and FP -- Objects vs. Functional -- Avoiding reductionist thinking

Real Quote (lightly edited to remove tangential nonsense.)

Recently, I watched a video and it stated that OO is about nouns and Functional programming is about the verbs. Also, ... Aspect-Oriented Programming with the e Verification Language  by David Robinson 

It would be nice to have a blog post which summarized the various mindset associated w/ the various paradigms.

Sigh.

I find the word "mindset" to be challenging.

Yes. All Turing Complete programming languages do have a kind of fundamental equivalence at the level of computing stuff represented as numbers. This, however, seems reductionist.

["All languages were one language to him. All languages were 'woddly'." Paraphrased from James Thurber's "The Great Quillow", a must-read.]

So. Beyond the core Turing Completeness features of a language, the rest is reduced to a difference in "mindset"? The only difference is how we pronounce "Woddly?"

"Mindset" feels reductionist. It replaces a useful summary of language features with a dismissive "mindset" categorization of languages. In a way, this seems to result from bracketing technology choices as "religious wars," where the passion for a particular choice outweighs the actual relevance; i.e., "All languages have problems, so use Java."

In my day job, I work with three kinds of Python problems:

• Data Science
• API Services
• DevOps/TechOps Automation

In many cases, one person can have all three problems. These aren't groups of people. These are problem domains.

I think the first step is to replace "mindset" with "problem domain". It's a start, but I'm not sure it's that simple.

When someone has a data science problem, they often solve it with purely function features of Python. Generally they do this via numpy, but I've been providing examples of generator expressions and comprehensions in my Code Dojo webinars. Generator expressions are an elegant, functional approach to working with stateless data objects.

In Python 3, the following kind of code doesn't create gigantic intermediate data structures. The functional transformations are applied to each item generated by the "source".

x = map(transform, source)
y = filter(selector_rule, x)
z = Counter(y)

I prefer to suggest that a fair amount of data analysis involves little or no mutation of state. Functional features of a language seem to work well with immutable data.

There is state change, but it's at a macro level. For example, the persistence of capturing data is a large-scale state change that's often implemented at the OS level, not the language level.

When someone's building an API, on the other hand, they're often working with objects that have a mutating state. Some elements of an API will involve state change, and objects model state change elegantly. RESTful API's can deserialize objects from storage, make changes, and serialize the modified object again.

[This summary of RESTful services is also reductionist, and therefore, possibly unhelpful.]

When there's mutability, then objects might be more appropriate than functions.

I'm reluctant to call this "mindset." It may not be "problem domain." It seems to be a model that involves mutable or immutable state.

When someone's automating their processing, they're wrestling with OS features, and OS management of state change. They might be installing stuff, or building Docker images, or gluing together items in a CI/CD pipeline, setting the SSL keys, or figuring out how to capture Behave output as part of Gherkin acceptance testing. Lots of interesting stuff that isn't the essential problem at hand, but is part of building a useful, automated solution to the problem.

The state in these problems is maintained by the OS. Application code may -- or may not -- try to model that state.

When doing Blue/Green deployments, for example, the blueness and greenness isn't part of the server farm, it's part of an internal model of how the servers are being used. This seems to be stateful; object-oriented programming might be helpful. When the information can be gleaned from asset management tools, then perhaps a functional processing stream is more important for gathering, deciding, and taking action.

I'm leaning toward the second view-point, and suggesting that some of the OO DevOps programming might be better looked at as functional map-filter-reduce processing. Something like

action_to_take = some_decision_pipeline(current state, new_deployment)

This reflects the questions of state change. It may not be the right abstraction though, because carrying out the action is, itself, a difficult problem that involves determining the state of the server farm, and then applying some change to one or more servers.

We often think of server state change as imperative in nature. It feels like object-oriented programming. There are steps, the object models those steps. I'm not sure that's right. I think there's a repeated "determine next action" cycle here. Sometimes it involves waiting for an action to finish. Yes, it sounds like polling the server farm. I'm not sure that's wrong. How else do you know a server is crashed except by polling it?

I think we've moved a long way from "mindset."

I think it's about fitting language features to a problem in a way that creates the right abstraction to capture (and eventually) solve the problem.

I haven't mentioned Aspect-Oriented Programming because it seems to cut across the functional/object state management boundary. It's a distinctive approach to organizing reusable functionality. I don't mean to dismiss it as uninteresting. I mean to set it aside as orthogonal to the "mutable state" consideration that seems to to be one of the central differences between OOP and FP.

In response to the request: "No. I won't map mindset to paradigm."