Technology Musings

September 10, 2008

Features / Separating Value from State

JB

Lambda-the-Ultimate had an link to an interesting language called Clojure:

 By identity I mean a stable logical entity associated with a series of different values over time. Models need identity for the same reasons humans need identity - to represent the world. How could it work if identities like 'today' or 'America' had to represent a single constant value for all time? Note that by identities I don't mean names (I call my mother Mom, but you wouldn't).

So, for this discussion, an identity is an entity that has a state, which is its value at a point in time. And a value is something that doesn't change. 42 doesn't change. June 29th 2008 doesn't change. Points don't move, dates don't change, no matter what some bad class libraries may cause you to believe. Even aggregates are values. The set of my favorite foods doesn't change, i.e. if I prefer different foods in the future, that will be a different set.
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In Clojure's model, value calculation is purely functional. Values never change. New values are functions of old, not mutations. But logical identity is well supported, via atomic references to values (Refs and Agents). Changes to references are controlled/coordinated by the system - i.e. cooperation is not optional and not manual. The world moves forward due to the cooperative efforts of its participants and the programming language/system, Clojure, is in charge of world consistency management. The value of a reference (state of an identity) is always observable without coordination, and freely shareable between threads.

It is worth constructing programs this way even when there is only one participant (thread). Programs are easier to understand/test when functional value calculation is independent of identity/value association. And it's easy to add other participants when they are (inevitably) needed.

Sounds incredibly interesting!