FBP in Common Lisp

Guess what!

No.

I can finally tell you what I'm doing at work. A friend has suggested that I just not mention that there are things I still can't talk about, so I won't. In any case, all the interesting stuff is fair game. Apparently, I'm allowed to talk about it in much greater detail than I can write about it because a persistent record is still frightening to some humans. Progress, I guess.

We've been doing Flow Based Programming in Common Lisp.

Damn it feels good to finally get that off my chest. I have no idea how Yegge stopped blogging. I'm guessing he hasn't, but rather just stopped publishing the results. I've been writing about one thing for the past little while, and the number of ideas I need to discuss with the rubber duck at some point is staggering. If my output rate were zero, I would probably have a pretty tenuous grip on my sanity.

This is heading off topic. Once more, with feeling

Flow Based Programming in Common Lisp

I'm not sure what I think about it yet. Lets just be clear about that up-front. You'll find plenty of FBP True Believers on the appropriate Google group[1], but I am not one of those. The fact that I'm willing to throw a couple years behind the idea implies curiosity, nothing more.

A matter quite apart from the underlying structure is our implementation of it, and I am certain that it's over-complicated. Granted, based on all the others I've seen, ours is the least over-complicated, but still. That's something I'll aim to fix, with a personal project as a last resort, if I can't convince anyone else about it. But I digress. Again.

Here's why I'm curious. This is what a basic web server looks like in flow-based terms:

And here's what it looks like once you add SSE capability to it:

and finally, here's what it looks like when we add sessions into the mix

The above is by far the most useful set of images I've got for understanding what's actually going on behind the scenes of a page-view. I've worked through the principles in multiple languages and spent quite a bit of time thinking about it, but until I sat down to draw it out, it didn't feel like I really understood what needed to be done. You probably don't know the same languages I do, but the above is still likely intelligible to you. So that's why I'm curious.

Flow Based Programming vs. Functional Programming

Before I go, I want to tackle this, because several people I've talked to have gotten tripped up in the comparison. Including me. I ended up deleting a few lines from this post that said

The underlying problem for my lack of "wow" reaction might actually be my usual languages. I'm used to thinking about streams moving between inter-connected, lazy processors. That's the main way I conceptualize Haskell. In fact, if you squint just a bit, it's the way you can conceptualize most functional programs, pure or not. -Inaimathi

The difference is that functional programming focuses on partial conceptual separation, whereas FBP takes the isolation concept a few steps further by enforcing complete conceptual separation as well as complete temporal separation. Here's the accompanying thought experiment, just to clarify what I mean by that.

Suppose you were writing in a functional language and wrote the following:

def foo():
   ...
   bar("something")
   baz("something else")

def bar(arg):
   ...
   doStuff()

def baz(arg):
   ...
   doOtherStuff()

Firstly, notice that, while the functions are conceptually separate units[2], foo still has to know about bar and baz. That prevents total isolation. Yes, you can re-define bar and baz in-flight if your language is dynamic enough, but you need to have them both defined and you need to have them named bar and baz before foo can actually run.

Secondly, note that what's happening there is most likely a bunch of synchronous work. That is, when foo calls bar and baz, both calls complete and then foo returns the return value of baz[3]. If you wrote the equivalent in a pure-functional language, the actual work may happen in a different order than you see it written out, subject to what the compiler can prove about the behavior of the functions involved, but bar and baz will still complete before foo does. If they didn't, you'd get some unexpected behavior in any callers of foo.

Now, lets take a look at the apparently equivalent, Lisp-flavoured, FBP-style program.

(define-part foo ()
  ...
  (out! :out "something")
  (out! :log "something else"))

(define-part bar ()
  ...
  (do-stuff))

(define-part baz ()
  (do-other-stuff))

(define-container box 
    (:foo (foo) :bar (bar) :baz (baz))
  ((:foo :out) -> (:bar :in))
  ((:foo :log) -> (:baz :in))))

First, notice that foo doesn't know anything about bar or baz, or anything about the existence of either. At some point during its execution, it outputs two messages to some implementation-dependent output structure, but critically foo itself is not responsible for delivering those outputs to their consumers. That allows for total part-agnosticism; you really can shuffle parts around with pin-equivalent parts and have the result work. In functional or actors-based systems, you can almost do the same; the exception is that since each sender/caller has to name targets in some way, you need to change small chunks of code in places where functions/actors interoperate.

Second, note that there's nothing in this system about the timing of bar and baz. This omission includes the fact that both, either or neither may run before foo completes. In this model of the world, if bar takes a while to run, neither baz nor foo, nor any of their callers are prevented from further operation. The second critical difference is, essentially, that asynchronous operation is the norm.

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Footnotes

1 - [back] - Currently mostly Javascripters thanks to the hype surrounding noflo.

2 - [back] - Assuming the programmer hasn't done something "clever" with global variables, gotos or comefroms.

3 - [back] - which happens to be the return value of doOtherStuff.