Immuto - Epilogue
It's been a couple of months since I had a scrap of time to do anything with Immuto - I've been up to my knees in WPF/C# instead (working for a living).
This break has given me a new perspective (aside from the obvious one that WPF is yucky). The executive summary is that I don't see myself ever using Immuto seriously. The way I look at it now is almost as a satire on the rigid idea of "single reducer function for the whole application state". It wasn't intended that way! I was genuinely into it and was expecting to use it in my job. But now it looks very different. And as Immuto is just a flavour of Redux, it's a broader comment on Redux itself.
What do I mean by a satire? I mean it's like I was trying to show the absurdity of something by pretending to take it seriously. (Except I was taking it seriously). My dad told me a story from around 1969 when he went to a conference. The latest hot debate topic at the time was Goto Considered Harmful, and some speaker put some source code on the overhead projector and invited the room to critique it. Hands went up and all the suggestions were to get rid of the GOTOs, of course. So as a group they began editing the code to try and get rid of the GOTOs and be good Structured Programmers, and the structure of the program become more and more absurd and unreadable as the exercise progressed.
Immuto - Radical Unification
Immuto continues to evolve rapidly. To ensure that I comply with Semantic Versioning, in which major version 0 implies an unstable API, I've been making major breaking changes every day or so.
The major shift since the first write-up is left-to-right cursor composition. Example - here's the signature of a function that gets a book from a shelf:
Immuto - Working with React (An Example)
UPDATE - I'm in the move-fast-and-break-things phase so a couple of details in here are already out of date. In particular, properties are now unified with cursors. See the various repos for details.
In Immuto - Strongly Typed Redux Composition I introduced the Immuto library by coyly describing a wish-list of features, as if I hadn't already written the darn thing. Shucks!
What I didn't do was show how to make a working UI in React, using Immuto to define all the actions and the structure of the store. The missing piece is another package:
Immuto - Strongly Typed Redux Composition
What's good about Redux, I once asked, and I answered with a few things. Like React, it is one of those rare outbreaks of sanity that happen now and then. Read the docs, they're easy.
There's very little to the library (which is a good thing), because the main thing it implements is the store, which in its basic form is a very simple idea. I noted before how it says very little about composition patterns. I want ways of plugging reducers together, but with complete static type safety, so that it is not possible to dispatch the wrong kind of action, or an action whose data is not of the right type.
One composition feature is combineReducers, which from a static typing perspective leaves us nowhere to go. Sometimes this happens because TypeScript is lacking some capability, but sometimes it's just because the library has done something undesirable and I think that's the case here, for reasons I will now go into at great length.