Question

I’ve found UML useful for documenting various aspects of OO systems, particularly class diagrams for overall architecture and sequence diagrams to illustrate particular routines. I’d like to do the same kind of thing for my clojure applications. I’m not currently interested in Model Driven Development, simply on communicating how applications work.

Is UML a common / reasonable approach to modelling functional programming? Is there a better alternative to UML for FP?

Answer 1

Most functional programmers prefer types to diagrams. (I mean types very broadly speaking, to include such things as Caml “module types”, SML “signatures”, and PLT Scheme “units”.) To communicate how a large application works, I suggest three things:

• Give the type of each module. Since you are using Clojure you may want to check out the “Units” language invented by Matthew Flatt and Matthias Felleisen. The idea is to document the types and the operations that the module depends on and that the module provides.

• Give the import dependencies of the interfaces. Here a diagram can be useful; in many cases you can create a diagram automatically using dot. This has the advantage that the diagram always accurately reflects the code.

• For some systems you may want to talk about important dependencies of implementations. But usually not—the point of separating interfaces from implementations is that the implementations can be understood only in terms of the interfaces they depend on.

There was recently a related question on architectural thinking in functional languages.