The Billion Dollar Mistake

Within the past few months, I have become enamored with algebraic data types (ADTs). The power that they give you to model data preciesely and safely is amazing to me. A simple example of an ADT is Maybe or Option (depending on the language you are using).

Maybe represents an incredibly common situation in programming: representing data or a lack of the aforementioned data. In Elm, Maybe looks like this:

type Maybe a
    = Just a
    | Nothing

The a in Maybe a represents a type parameter/generic parameter. It is used in the Just a part you see above, so the compiler can know what type of data it is holding in the Maybe. You can conceptually think of Maybe a as "a value in a context". In the case of Maybe, the context is that the value is either present in a Just

But how do you work with a Maybe? Good question. For example, you can use a case statement in Elm, which forces you to check if your Maybe a value is Nothing instead of Just. This eliminates a huge class of bugs (As a C# programmer, I don't miss NullReferenceExceptions). Here's an example:

userMessage : Maybe String
userMessage =
    Nothing


validationMessage : String
validationMessage =
    case userMessage of
        Just message ->
            "You put in: " ++ message

        Nothing ->
            "Hey, you! Yeah, you! You didn't input a message!"

The above case statement lets us declaratively write code that handles errors. This has a multitude of benefits:

• Type safety: handles all cases of errors, by definition it is impossible to miss a corner case of an error and then crash your application
• Readability: the potential states and what to do in each state is made very apparent
• Refactorability (?): while moving code around, you can't accidentally forget to handle a Maybe value and cause a debugging headache later on

All of these together combine to form a wonderful developer experience and have really made me think differently about how I code.

Coming to functional programming from the world of imperative, object oriented programming has been a string of "Aha!" and "Why haven't I heard of this before?" moments, and hopefully today I helped you have a eureka moment of your own :)