Comment by jimbokun 10 months ago
A good way to keep a program in your head:
Break it up into a few or several smaller programs that interact through clean interfaces. Then you can keep one smaller, simpler program in your head at a time, then integrate them at the end once all the smaller programs are working.
Sometimes.
Sometimes it is one or more programs writing to a queue or topic, and other programs reading from that topic.
Or programs writing to and others reading from a Unix pipe.
Or programs talking to each other using HTTP.
Or Erlang processes communicating concurrently on one machine or across a network.
Or different programs sharing one database.
Or many objects communicating by passing messages in a small talk program.
There are many ways to encapsulate programs and have them interact.
> Or programs writing to and others reading from a Unix pipe.
write(message), read() -> message
> Or programs talking to each other using HTTP.
request() -> response
> Or Erlang processes communicating concurrently on one machine or across a network.
sendMess(message), waitMess() -> message
> Or different programs sharing one database.
execute(query) -> response
...
I'm a mathematician at heart so I'm staying away from category theory as long as possible.
This must not be done prematurely. Replacing function calls with processes quickly break “go to definition” and all the other conveniences or guardrails provided by your compiler toolchain.
Unfortunately been dropped into that situation. The system was constantly broken due to missing of malformated arguments. Nobody dared to change anything.
Same applies to prematurely microservicing a monolith. At least there folks seem to be sensible enough to use protobufs or json, instead of loosely typed strings.
Those are called functions.