Component Simplicity

There is a common metaphor for hyperspace travel in science fiction, where some scientist type explains how the FTL works by taking a piece of paper, drawing a line on it to demonstrate “normal” travel, then folding the paper to bring the origin and destination together. Imperative code affords straight line approaches to problem. I have some code. It does 73 things. I need it to do a 74th thing, in the middle of one of the things it currently does, which is itself a complicated mixture of the other 72 things going on. The most direct approach is just to slap some code in the middle of the thing that does the new thing. I have seen many code bases that are the result of person-centuries of this style of programming. Despite superficially having functions and modules, it is architecturally just a list of things to do, often multiple lists haphazardly mashed together. Imperative code affords this style of programming because it is often in the moment the locally easiest thing to do, an ... Read full article.