Question

I have been trying to wrap my head around functional programming for a while now. I have looked up lambda calculus, LISP, OCaml, F# and even combinatorial logic but the main problem I have is this – how do you do things that require side effects like:

• interacting with a user,
• communicating with a remote service, or
• handle simulating using random sampling

without violating the fundamental premise of pure functional programming which is, that for a given input the output is deterministic?

I hope I am making sense; if not I welcome any attempts to help me understand. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Most real-world functional programming is not “pure” in most senses, so half of the answer to your question is “you do it by giving up on purity”. That said, there are alternatives.

In the “purest” sense of pure, the entire program represents a single function of one or more arguments, returning a value. If you squint your eyes and wave your hands a bit, you can declare that all user input is part of the function’s “arguments” and that all output is part of the “return value” and then fudge things a bit so that it only does the actual I/O “on demand”.

A similar perspective is to declare that the input to the function is “the entire state of the outside world” and that evaluating the function returns a new, modified “state of the world”. In that case, any function in the program that uses the world state is obviously freed from being “deterministic” since no two evaluations of the program will have exactly the same outside world.

If you wanted to write an interactive program in the pure lambda calculus (or something equivalent, such as the esoteric language Lazy K), that’s conceptually how you’d do it.

In more practical terms, the problem comes down to making sure that I/O occurs in the correct order when input is being used as an argument to a function. The general structure of the “pure” solution to this problem is function composition. For instance, say you have three functions that do I/O and you want to call them in a certain order. If you do something like RunThreeFunctions(f1, f2, f3) there’s nothing to determine the order they’ll be evaluated in. On the other hand, if you let each function take another function as an argument, you can chain them like this: f1( f2( f3())), in which case you know that f3 will be evaluated first because the evaluation of f2 depends on its value. [Edit: See also the comment below about lazy vs. eager evaluation. This is important, because lazy evaluation is actually quite common in very pure contexts; e.g., the standard implementation of recursion in the pure lambda calculus is nonterminating under eager evaluation.]

Again, to write an interactive program in the lambda calculus, this is how you’d probably do it. If you wanted something actually usable for programming in, you’d probably want to combine the function composition part with the conceptual structure of functions taking and returning values representing the state of the world, and create some higher-order abstraction to handling pipelining the “world state” values between I/O functions, ideally also keeping the “world state” contained in order to enforce strict linearity–at which point you’ve all but reinvented Haskell’s IO Monad.

Hopefully that didn’t just make you even more confused.