Names, Values, Identities, States and Time

“No man can cross the same river twice, because neither the man nor the river are the same.”

Heraclitus

The following post is extracted & paraphrased from Rich Hickey's excellent Are We There Yet? - specifically the section of the talk that focuses on the model for discussing and thinking about the titular concepts. These concepts are in turn taken from the philosophical writings of Alfred North Whitehead (a co-author of Principia Mathematica).

I often find myself wanting to explain this core concept to people who are new to Clojure, and particularly people who I am trying to make into people who are new to Clojure. While I think I have a good handle on this concept in my head - I sometimes struggle to explain it succinctly, hopefully this post achieves that goal.

Definitions

These definitions are not really globally applicable, but they represent the precise meaning I try to capture when discussing values changing over time in the context of software development and programming.

Value

A value is some measurable quantity, magnitude or amount for which its equivalence to some other value can be determined. A value can also be some immutable composite of other values. The number 42 is a value, the string "Hello World" is a value, the list (1, 2, 3) is also a value.

Identity

An identity is some composite psychological concept we apply to a succession of values over time where they are in some way causally related. You are an identity, I am an identity, a river is an identity (see below).

Name

A name is simply a label that we apply to an identity or a value to make it easier to refer to. The same identity can have many names. "Glen", "Glen Mailer", "Mr Mailer", "Glenjamin" and "@glenathan" are all names which could legitimately be considered to refer to the identity that is myself in the appropriate context. Likewise the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything" is a name for the value 42.

State

A state is simply the value of an identity at a particular time. A snapshot, if you will. Under this definition state does not change, and thus there is no such thing as "mutable state".

Time

Purely relative, it has no dimensions - it can only tell us whether something happened before or after some other thing (or at the same time).

The River

Let us consider the title quote in the context of these definitions. To help us examine the proverbial river under this light, we shall give ourselves the same powers as when running a computer program but in the real world - which requires us to sidestep some fairly fundamental physics - hopefully this will not cause any lasting damage.

The third-longest river in Asia runs through China. Depending on context it is known as the "Yellow River", "Huang He", "རྨ་ཆུ།", "the cradle of Chinese civilization" and "China's Sorrow". All of these are names for the same river, which itself is an identity.

If we were to freeze an instant in time into a snapshot of our proverbial river crossing, this state would contain a value composed of a large number of atomic (in the irreducible sense) smaller values. For simplicity, lets assume that water molecules are immutable. In this case then the state of the river we are crossing can be said to be the current arrangement of all these immutable water molecule values.

At some point in the future when returning for our second crossing, we take another snapshot of the river as our new state. The river's value is again the arrangement of all the immutable water molecules - but this time they are all different molecules with different values.

The state of the identity which is the river named "Huang He" at this later point in time is measurably different from the value we took during the first crossing.

In Clojure

Since immutability is at it's core, we'll start here for some code examples.

The following code should work correctly when pasted into a running Clojure REPL.

In JavaScript

JavaScript doesn't have the same set of immutable primitives, but we can achieve a similar effect with a little sleight of hand.

The following code should work correctly when pasted into the browser console or a Node.js REPL line-by-line.

Summary

The ancient Greeks knew about the perils of mutable state a long time ago - we're only now rediscovering this for ourselves.

In a language like Clojure, that was designed from the ground up with this in mind, it's easy to take back control and tease apart the separate concepts I've described. Even in a language like JavaScript, designed in a week at a time when mutability was commonplace, we can achieve a similar effect with a measure of self-control. There are also libraries like mori and immutable-js which provide much fuller implementations of the data-types required to avoid mutability.

If you remain unconvinced, I recommend watching Are We There Yet?. If you're still not sure after that, you're either a far better programmer than me, or you're yet to experience the pain of trying to reason about a large codebase riddled with unchecked mutability.

Addendum

As well as the above definitions, Are We There Yet? contains this gem, which is Rich visualising the idea of obvious complexity while saying "Grrrrr".









Stuff to Follow Up From EuroClojure 2014

So I've just spent the last two days at EuroClojure, which was excellent. I met plenty of really great, really friendly and really smart people. It gave me plenty to think about, and inspired me to try and write and share more about my own experiences with Clojure.

To kick this off, for my own benefit as well as any readers, here follows a list of everything I made a note of to look into further, read or watch.

For a fuller set of notes from the conference, be sure to check out Phil Potter's notes.

Day One

  • Fergal Byrne: Real Machine Intelligence with Neuroscience
  • Logan Campbell: Using Clojure at a Post Office (Australia Post)
    • Vlad for validations
    • core.typed for optional type checking
    • "Show people code to sell the benefits" - on Clojure vs Scala (or vs Anything else)
    •  http-kit's async http requests + core.async for simple lightweight concurrency when calling downstream services
    • On a new project, engage very early with the Systems/Ops team
    • Get something delivered end-to-end as early as possible: pave the way for more
    • App Dynamics
    • metrics-clojure
  • Tommy Hall: Escaping DSL Hell
    • If you're writing a language, be sure to actually design it
    • When you invent a DSL, people will want loops
    • You're better off embedding in a real language than inventing your own
    • Geomlab - DSL for learning, but dead-end as skills not directly transferrable
    • CLJSFiddle
    • Incanter - example of a great DSL embedded in clojure
    • Try doing SICP in ClojureScript
    • ClojureScript (and Clojure) need a much better day zero experience
  • Paul Ingles: multi-armed bandit optimisations
    • Its far easier to compare relative values, than to evaluate absolute values
    • Multi-armed bandit is about exploration vs exploitation
    • Thompson sampling models results so far into a probability distribution used to select the next value
  • Tommi Reiman: JSON APIs
  • Rich Hickey: Some core.async internals
    • Channels are just a conveyor belt
    • Use put! to throw stuff into a channel from the main thread
    • There are no unbounded buffers allowed. at all. ever.
    • Channels have a hard limit of 1024 queued items without buffers
  • Hallway Track

Day Two

  • David Nolen: Invention & Innovation
  • Phil Potter: test.check
  • Chris Ford: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Curry-Howard Correspondence
  • Anna Pawlicka: Reactive data visualisations with Om
  • Malcolm Sparks: Assembling secure Clojure applications from re-usable parts
    • Liberator for building web APIs
    • bidi for declarative routing - as opposed to function composition, which cannot be reversed into URLs
    • Modular: an experiment in meta-architecture for more reusable components
    • There seems to be an inherent tension between dynamism and late binding, and composable modularity (which involves some form of encapsualtion)
  • Hallway Track


If nothing else, I think I've realised I need to be more consistent with my note taking - apologies to any speakers I didn't make notes about!