Functional programming emphasizes “pure” functions, functions that have no side effects. When you call a pure function, all you need to know is the return value of the function. You can be confident that calling a function doesn’t leave any state changes that will effect future function calls.

But pure functions are only pure at a certain level of abstraction. Every function has some side effect: it uses memory, it takes CPU time, etc. Harald Armin Massa makes this point in his PyCon 2010 talk “The real harm of functional programming.” (His talk is about eight minutes into the February 21, 2010 afternoon lightning talks: video.)

Even pure functions in programming have side effects. They use memory. They use CPU. They take runtime. And if you look at those evil languages, they are quite fast at doing Fibonacci or something, but in bigger applications you get reports “Hmm, I have some runtime problems. I don’t know how to get it faster or what it going wrong.

Massa argues that the concept of an action without side effects is dangerous because it disassociates us from the real world. I disagree. I appreciate his warning that the “no side effect” abstraction may leak like any other abstraction. But pure functions are a useful abstraction.

You can’t avoid state, but you can partition the stateful and stateless parts of your code. 100% functional purity is impossible, but 85% functional purity may be very productive.

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