Arguments in favor of functional programming are often unconvincing. For example, the most common argument is that functional programming makes it easier to “reason about your code.” That’s true to some extent. All other things being equal, it’s easier to understand a function if all its inputs and outputs are explicit. But all other things are not equal. In order to make one function easier to understand, you may have to make something else harder to understand.

Here’s an argument from Brian Beckman for using a functional style of programming in a particular circumstance that I find persuasive. The immediate context is Kalman filtering, but it applies to a broad range of mathematical computation.

By writing a Kalman ﬁlter as a functional fold, we can test code in friendly environments and then deploy identical code with confidence in unfriendly environments. In friendly environments, data are deterministic, static, and present in memory. In unfriendly, real-world environments, data are unpredictable, dynamic, and arrive asynchronously.

If you write the guts of your mathematical processing as a function to be folded over your data, you can isolate the implementation of your algorithm from the things that make code hardest to test, i.e. the data source. You can test your code in a well-controlled “friendly” test environment and deploy exactly the same code into production, i.e. an “unfriendly” environment.

Brian continues:

The flexibility to deploy exactly the code that was tested is especially important for numerical code like filters. Detecting, diagnosing and correcting numerical issues without repeatable data sequences is impractical. Once code is hardened, it can be critical to deploy exactly the same code, to the binary level, in production, because of numerical brittleness. Functional form makes it easy to test and deploy exactly the same code because it minimizes the coupling between code and environment.

I ran into this early on when developing clinical trial methods first for simulation, then for production. Someone would ask whether we were using the same code in production as in simulation.

“Yes we are.”

“Exactly the same code?”

“Well, essentially.”

“Essentially” was not good enough. We got to where we would use the exact same binary code for simulation and production, but something analogous to Kalman folding would have gotten us there sooner, and would have made it easier to enforce this separation between numerical code and its environment across applications.

Why is it important to use the exact same binary code in test and production, not just a recompile of the same source code? Brian explains:

Numerical issues can substantially complicate code, and being able to move exactly the same code, without even recompiling, between testing and deployment can make the difference to a successful application. We have seen many cases where differences in compiler flags, let alone differences in architectures, even between different versions of the same CPU family, introduce enough differences in the generated code to cause qualitative differences in the output. A filter that behaved well in the lab can fail in practice.

Emphasis added, here and in the first quote above.

Note that this post gives an argument for a functional style of programming, not necessarily for the use of functional programming languages. Whether the numerical core or the application that uses it would best be written in a functional language is a separate discussion.

More functional programming posts