[Haskell-beginners] How Haskell Fits Into an Operating System / API Environment

[Heinrich Apfelmus]

damodar kulkarni wrote:
>> Curiously, whenever I use state, my programs start to become similarly
>> brittle. There is no reason why state should be a fundamental element of a
>> programming language, and as a design pattern, state is best avoided at all
>> cost.
> 
> 
> Just as a curiosity, how would one avoid state in cases like protocol
> design? e.g. protocols specifications (like TCP/IP) do have a large element
> of state dependent behavior that "seems essential" to the problem. How
> would one deal with such cases?

Well, in a protocol like TCP/IP, the response of a participant does 
depend on the history of the communication, and that history can neatly 
be summarized in a small amount of state. I don't think it's possible to 
avoid state in this case.

But I meant something else, actually, and should have been more precise. 
Namely, it is best to avoid *mutable* state as a *design pattern*, i.e. 
the use of IORef and thelike. Pure functions  State -> State  are fine, 
but anything were the meaning of an expression depends heavily on the 
context (the program state) is prone to bugs. The problem is more about 
source code than it is about state. To avoid bugs, each piece of source 
code should be understandable in isolation, i.e. it should give the same 
results in all contexts ("code paths"). This way, it is a lot easier to 
determine its correctness.


Of course, "source code" has different scales, and can include protocol 
design. After all, protocols are made by humans, and clever design can 
prevent headaches later. For instance, HTTP GET requests were designed 
to be stateless, and that makes the protocol a lot more robust.


Best regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus

--
http://apfelmus.nfshost.com