In our last post, we talked about what Tacit Programming is, how it can help reduce argument count of public API functions using known concrete implementations, and how it can help shrink code size & function count for Array comprehensions and Promise chaining.
In this post, we’ll show some helpful ways to use tacit programming in data validation & composing functions together synchronously as well as an example of taking things way too far.
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Tacit Programming, also called point-free style, is a way to write functions without specifying the arguments. While functional programming languages have more abilities to leverage this style, there is still two key things you can use point-free style to help with in JavaScript, Python, and Lua that I wanted to cover today. Specifically reducing the amount of arguments for functions, and aiding in composition by writing less code.
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My co-worker, Jason Kaiser, created a way for Promises not to fail, called sureThing. It has 3 benefits to your code that we’ll illustrate below including prior art in other programming languages so you know this isn’t some made-up concept.
A pure function:
const add = (a, b) => a + b
vs. a total function:
const addNumbers = (a, b) =>
( isNumber(a) && isNumber(b) )
? {ok: true, data: a + b}
: {ok: false, error: new Error(Either a or b aren't Numbers.)}
While same input, same output, no side effects sounds like the end all, be all… it’s not.