DaedTech

Stories about Software

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Enforcing Immutability in Multi-Threaded Projects with NDepend

Editorial Note: I originally wrote this post for the NDepend blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, have a look around at some of the features you get by downloading NDepend.

Early in the days of object oriented programming, we really got a lot of mileage out of the language and paradigm features.  For instance, if your memory extends back far enough (or your application is legacy enough), you’ll see really, really deep inheritance hierarchies.  Since inheritance was a language feature, it stood to reason that we should get our money’s worth, and boy did we ever.  We look back on that as an anti-pattern now with our 20/20 hindsight.

The same was true of application state.  The classic notion of object oriented programming was one in which objects of state and of behaviors.  For perhaps the most iconic early conception of this notion, consider the active record design pattern.  This pattern addressed the so-called impedance mismatch by presenting us with an in-memory, object-based representation of a database table.  The object’s state was the table and the behaviors were records that you could perform on it, such as saving or deleting or what have you.

While active record, particularly in some communities, has not been as roundly rejected as deep inheritance hierarchies, it no longer enjoys the favor that it did more than a decade ago.  And a big part of the reason that it, and other state-based patterns don’t, is that the object-oriented community has come to favor immutability, meaning that any data stored in an object is read-only for the lifetime of that object.

vendingmachine

Immutable objects are, first and foremost, easier to reason about.  Take, for instance, the humble object collaborator.

public class ServiceConsumer
{
    public Service TheService { get; set; }

    public void UseTheService()
    {
        var aBeer = TheService.GetMeABeer();
    }
}

This may or may not work, depending on what people come along and do with TheService.  What happens if they null it out?  To make life easier, we move away from mutable state implementations in favor of approaches like this.

public class ServiceConsumer
{
    private readonly Service _service;
        
    public ServiceConsumer(Service service)
    {
        if (service == null)
            throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(service));

        _service = service;
    }

    public void UseTheService()
    {
        var aBeer = _service.GetMeABeer();
    }
}

Now there’s no reason to worry about the service being valid.  At the time of object construction, we enforce any preconditions, and then we don’t need to worry that _service.GetMeABeer() is going to generate a null reference exception or wind up calling a different implementation than the last time it was invoked.  ServiceConsumer is now immutable with respect to Service.

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The SOLID Principles in Real Life

Editorial note: I originally wrote this post for the Infragistics blog.  You can check out the original post here, at their site.  There’s a lot of good content over there in general, so go check it out.

Hopefully you’re familiar with the SOLID principles, particularly if you program in object oriented languages.  The wisdom contained therein (mostly) isn’t limited to object oriented languages, but such languages were the intended target.

If you’re not familiar and don’t have time to read the linked Wikipedia page, SOLID is a mnemonic acronym for five principles of object oriented programming or, as I hinted, really just programming in general (except, perhaps for the Liskov Substitution Principle).  These concepts have been around since at least the early 2000s and have truly stood the test of time.

What you get by following them is code that’s a lot more likely to be maintainable.  These design guidelines, properly followed, will tend to steer you toward writing clean code.

What I’d like to do is offer real life analogs of the principles.  I’d imagine that this may make them easier to remember, but I think it can also serve to drive the points home in the first place and help encourage the “aha” moment if you haven’t yet had them.  And, even if you have, it never hurts to have a visual to help reinforce the concept or to explain it someone else — even someone non-technical, potentially.

S is for Single Responsibility Principle

The single responsibility principle (SRP) asserts that a class or module should do one thing only.  Now, this is kind of subjective, so the principle is reinforced with the heuristic that the class or module should have only one reason to change.

By way of counter-example, consider a class that opens a connection to the database, pulls out some table data, and writes the data to a file.  This class has multiple reasons to change: adoption of a new database, modified file output format, deciding to use an ORM, etc.  In terms of the SRP, we’d say that this class is doing too much.

In your day to day life, picture those “duck” vehicles you see occasionally in some lakeside towns.  They’re street legal and water-capable, so a duck tour affords you the unique and surreal experience of being in a ‘car’ that gets to the edge of the water and just keeps going.  Fun, right?

Duck

And yet, you don’t see a whole lot of them.  There are millions of families out there that own both cars and boats, and there are very few families that buy these ducks.  Do you know why?  It’s most likely because no one wants to be unable to drive to work because their boat rudder is broken.  Ducks are fun, but they’re also a great example of the pitfalls that the SRP can help you avoid.

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Why I Don’t Inherit from Collection Types

In one of the recent posts in the TDD chess series, I was asked a question that made me sort of stop and muse a little after it was asked. It had to do with whether to define a custom collection type or simply use an out of the box one and my thinking went, “well, I’d use an out of the box one unless there were some compelling reason to build my own.” This got me to thinking about something that had gone the way of the Dodo in my coding, which was to build collection types by inheriting from existing collections or else implementing collection interfaces. I used to do that and now I don’t do that anymore. At some point, it simply stopped happening. But why?

I never read some blog post or book that convinced me this was stupid, nor do I have any recollection of getting burned by this practice. There was no great moment of falling out — just a long-ago cessation that wasn’t a conscious decision, sort of like the point in your 20’s when it stops being a given that you’re going to be out until all hours on a Saturday night. I pondered this here and there for a week or so, and then I figured it out.

TDD happened. Er, well, I started practicing TDD as a matter of course, and, in the time since I started doing that, I never inherited from a collection type. Interesting. So, what’s the relationship?

Well, simply put, the relationship is that inheriting from a collection type just never seems to be the simplest way to get some test passing, and it’s never a compelling refactoring (if I were defining some kind of API library for developers and a custom collection type were a reasonable end-product, I would write one, but not for my own development sake). Inheriting from a collection type is, in fact, a rather speculative piece of coding. You’re defining some type that you want to use and saying “you know, it’d probably be handy if I could also do X, Y, and Z to it later.” But I’ve written my opinion about this type of activity.

Doing this also largely increases the surface area of your class. If I have a type that encapsulates some collection of things and I want to give clients the ability to access these things by a property such as their “Id” then I define a GetById(int) method (or whatever). But if I then say “well, you know what, maybe they want to access these things by position or iterate over them or something, so I’ll just inherit from List of Whatever, and give them all that goodness. But yikes! Now I’m responsible for maintaining a concept of ordering, handling the case of out of bounds indexing, and all sorts of other unpleasantness. So, I can either punt and delegate to the methods on the type that I’m wrapping or else I can get rid of the encapsulation altogether and just cobble additional functionality onto List.

But that’s an icky choice. I’m either coughing up all sorts of extra surface area and delegating it to something I’m wrapping (ugly design) or I’m kind of weirdly violating the SRP by extending some collection type to do domain sorts of things. And I’m doing this counter to what my TDD approach would bubble to the surface anyway. I’d never write speculative code at all. Until some client of mine were using something besides GetById(int), GetById(int) is all it’s getting.

This has led me to wonder if, perhaps, there’s some relationship between the rise of TDD and decoupled design and the adage to favor composition over inheritance. Deep inheritance hierarchies across namespaces, assemblies, and even authors, creates the kind of indirection that makes intention muddy and testing (especially TDD) a chore. I want a class that encapsulates details and provides behavior because I’m hitting that public API with tests to define behavior. I don’t want some class that’s a List for the most part but with other stuff tacked on — I don’t want to unit test the List class from the library at all.

It’s interesting speculation, but at the end of the day, the reason I don’t inherit from collection types is a derivative of the fact that I think doing so is awkward and I’m leerier and leerier of inheritance as time goes on. I really don’t do it because I never find it helpful to do so, tautological as that may seem. Perhaps if you’re like me and you just stop thinking of it as a tool in your tool chest, you won’t miss it.

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Interface Segregation Principle: A Practical Example

I’ve had this partially completed post in my drafts folder for a while, and, thanks to a sort of half-hearted New Years resolution to either finish or discard really old drafts, I’m going to finish this one. I changed the title and re-did the focus a bit, since this one was a year and a half old, and the code in question here is hazier and hazier in my mind. But it’s a tale of Singletons, needless coupling, poor cohesion, and woe.

I’ve been interviewing some candidates of late and one of the things I typically ask about is familiarity with the SOLID principles. An encouraging amount of people say things like, “oh sure, classes should have only one purpose” or “oh, yeah, we use IoC containers!” It seems as though S, O, and D get the most love, while L and I (Liskov Substitution Principle and Interface Segregation Principle, respectively) are rarely mentioned. Today, I’ll talk about I with an example that may hit home with you.

I worked on a project once with a fairly unique ‘architecture.’ It was a GUI-heavy desktop application with a reasonably straightforward set of domain objects that were read from persistence and stored in memory. This was accomplished using what really kind of amounted to an old school, C-style memory map of structs. There was a root object, and everything was hierarchically possessed by this root object. So, let’s say that you were modeling a parking lot full of cars — you’d navigate to the car parts via calls like Root.Cars[12].Engine.Battery or Root.Cars[5].Body.Exterior.Paint. And naturally, Root was implemented as a Singleton so that you could access this memory map from anywhere at any time to read or write. Yep. That was a long project.

This Singleton probably started out modestly enough, but by the time I had worked on the project, its sizable gravitational pull had roped smaller satellites, code-moons and free-falling bits of flotsam into it, creating a runaway juggernaut of anti-pattern. This thing was, if memory serves, pushing 10K lines of code and perhaps even spreading out into some partial classes. I think by the time I moved onto another project, it was showing the first signs of having an event horizon.

LargePlanet

There were several different skins on this desktop app, and for some reason, each of them had their own mini-versions of this Singleton (a much more modest 1K to 2K LOC, each), I guess to contain the skin-specific sprawl that would have created a circular reference situation with the behemoth itself. It was one of these mini-versions that inspired this post, along with a story a friend of mine told me after I’d left the project.

A few of us had, while working in this code base, endeavored to extract at least tiny pockets of code from the massive gravitational field of the Singletons so that we could write some unit tests and avoid the bug whack-a-mole game that ensued whenever you changed something in the global state. I was probably the most successful in fighting this battle and, my friend, having less success after I’d left, complained to me one day over lunch. He said that he’d had a perfectly testable class, but in a code review someone in a position of relative authority had pointed out that something he was doing was already done in one of the satellite Singletons and he should use that code. His request to hide the Singleton behind a wrapper or even an interface implementation was denied. A large portion of his class became thoroughly untestable because naturally, the first call to his stuff triggered the first lazy call to the satellite, which triggered the first lazy call to the black hole Singleton, which fired up every threading model, logger, aspect, and bit of file I/O in the history of creation, crushing the test runner like an insignificant gnat.

And this, to me, is perhaps the best argument for the Interface Segregation Principle that I’ve ever heard. As a quick recap, the ISP says that “clients should not be forced to depend upon interfaces that they don’t use.” In my friend’s case, depending on the utility method that he was being forced to use, in turn, made him depend on an entire, 1K+ LOC Singleton being initialized and, indirectly, a whole host of other application functionality. This was about the most egregious violation that I’d ever encountered.

What’s the alternative? Well, years later, it’s hard to list specifics, but how about pulling that utility out somewhere? If it relied on no global state, this is a no-brainer — just put it into its own class somewhere. Static, instance — it doesn’t matter — just not in that Singleton. If it relied on global state, then create a small interface with one method, have the satellite Singleton implement it, and hand that interface to the class in question. In either case, my friend’s class depends on a single method for that functionality and not the entire application domain and the code responsible for loading it (as well as loggers and other ancillary nonsense).

The Interface Segregation Principle asks you to keep your dependencies to a minimum. This will help you unit test, but it will also help your sanity at maintenance time. After all, would you rather debug a class that you knew depended on an external method or two, or one whose behavior could be explained by any one of tens of thousands of lines of code? These things will matter to you or whoever maintains the application. A lot. So think of this example and think of the ISP as you’re writing your code.

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Moving Away from State: State–

In 1968, Edsger Dijkstra issued a letter entitled “Go To Statement Considered Harmful,” and the age of structured programming was born. The letter was a call to stop programmers of the time from creating ad-hoc control flow structures using goto statements and to instead use these higher level constructs for manipulating flow through a function (contrary, I think, to the oft-attributed position that “goto is evil”). This gave rise to structured programming because it meant that progress in a method would be more visually trackable.

But I think there’s an interesting underlying concept here that informs a lot of shifts in programming practice. Specifically, I’m referring to the idea that Dijkstra conceived of “goto” as existing at an inappropriate level of abstraction when stacked with concepts like “if” and “while” and “case.” Those latter are elements of logical human reasoning while the former is a matter of procedure for a compiler. Or, to put it another way, the control flow statements tell humans how to read business logic, and the goto tells the compiler how to execute a program.

“State Considered Harmful” seems to be the new trend, ushering in the renaissance of functional programming. Functional programming itself is not a new concept. Lisp has been around for half a century, meaning that it actually predates object-oriented programming. Life always seems to be full of cycles, and this is certainly an example. But there’s more to it than people seeking new solutions in old ideas. The new frontier in faster processing and better computer performance is parallel processing. We can’t fit a whole lot more transistors on a chip, but we can fit more chips in a computer — and design schemes to split the work between them. And in order to do that successfully, it’s necessary to minimize the amount of temporarily stored information, or state.

I’ve found myself headed in that direction almost subconsciously. A lot of the handiest tools push you that way. I’ve always loved the fluent Linq methods in C#, and those generally serve as a relatively painless introduction to functional programming. You find yourself gravitating away from nested loops and local variables in favor of chained calls that express semantically what you want in only a line or two of code. But gravitating toward functional programming style goes beyond just using something like Linq, and it involves favoring chains of methods in which the output is a pure, side-effect-free function of the input.

EmptyGlass

Here have been some of the stops on my own journey away from state.

  1. Elimination of global state. The first step in this journey for me was to realize how odious global state is for the maintainability of an application.
  2. No state variables for communication between methods. Next to go for me were ‘flag’ variables that kept track of things in a class between method calls. As I became more proficient in unit testing, I found this to be a huge headache as it created complicated and brittle test setup, and it was really a pointless crutch anyway.
  3. Immutable > mutable. I’ve blogged about an idea I called “pointless mutability,” but in general I’ve come to favor immutable constructs over mutable ones whenever possible for simplicity.
  4. State isolation — for instance, model objects and domain objects for business logic state and viewmodels/controllers for GUI state. Aside from that, a lot of applications for which I am the architect retain virtually no state information. Services and other application scaffolding types of classes simply have interfaced references to their collaborators, but really keep track of nothing between method calls.
  5. Persistence ignorance — letting the application pretend that its state is storage. For less sophisticated (CRUD-style) applications, I’ve favored scenarios in which most of the code’s state is abstracted into a lower layer of the application and implemented only externally. In other words, if things are simple, let something like a database or file system be your application’s state. Why cache and over-complicate until/unless performance is an issue?

And that’s where I stand now as I write object-oriented code. I am interested in diving more into functional languages, as I’ve only played with them here and there since my undergrad days. It isn’t so much that they’re the new hotness as it is that I find myself heading that way anyway. And if I’m going to do it, I might as well do it consciously and in directed fashion. If and when I do get to do more playing, you can definitely bet that I’ll post about it.