A very simple question in a community channel earlier this week sent me deep into reflection on software design. I started writing software as is classically understood as Object Oriented Programming (OOP), with Java, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk. Design has been mostly about creating those little boxes that encapsulate behavior and state: the object. Rust in contrast I wouldn’t describe as an object-oriented programming language, to be honest I’m not sure what we call it. It’s not functional programming and it’s not object-oriented programming as I understand it. It’s something else which is the key to why Rust is so enjoyable.

The simple question from Mr Powers was:

Just noticed an interesting delta-rs / delta-spark difference. Delta Spark doesn’t let you instantiate a Delta Table with a specific table version, but delta-rs does.

  • delta-rs: DeltaTable("../rust/tests/data/simple_table", version=2)
  • delta-spark: DeltaTable.forPath(spark, "/path/to/table") - no version argument available

Are there any implications of this difference we should think about?

The difference may seem trivial, one appears to have an optional “constructor” parameter and the other does not, who cares? But that’s not it.

Will responded correctly with:

I think the distinction to make is that DeltaTable represents a table at some particular time, and not the table in general

The thing is, I was there when the first API was written. I remember the design discussions and considerations we evaluated. I didn’t catch the subtle change of thinking that was happening at the time.

When I am working in Ruby or Python, I find myself thinking about how to represent state and behavior as this black box. “How would I represent this in a diagram with boxes and arrows?”

Take a filter for example, a filter is almost always just behavior but when I might design something like that in Ruby or Python, Filter becomes a base class which may or may not end up having state too. The base class becomes the means for describing “things which behave like this” but the very nature of defining class implies state.

Most object-oriented languages follow my beloved Smalltalk where everything is an object which contains both behavior and state, even when that doesn’t quite make metaphorical sense.

Coming back to the question posed.

The reason this simple design difference seems so impactful to me is when I consider the Spark (Scala) implementation, it’s design bugs me. It bugs me in a way that it wouldn’t have, prior to starting to use Rust. Delta tables are constantly evolving as new writes occur, as new transactions are being written the idea of what the table is also changes with the underlying data. This is especially the case when a metadata change is committed to the transaction log. Therefore making an object encapsulate the concept of an ever-changing Table itself presents this jarring conflict: if I have this object, what is the actual nature of the object? How does (or does not) this object change over time?

Writing and reasoning about this, I think I have a better sense of what makes Rust so pleasing to work with. The ownership model and borrow checker do make things much easier, but the nature of a program is not object-oriented, nor is it functional, but something else. It accommodates the current reality of software development which is inherently multi-modal.

At our disposal we have:

  • Functions which do things, and can be grouped into modules, etc.
  • Structs which contain state, but like objects in other languages can have associated behaviors. Unlike in those object-oriented languages these cannot be extended. This forces the Rust developer to design structs around the state first and foremost. We are encouraged to take this data first approach and when combined with mutability and ownership rules, Rust programs tend to have fewer large evolving objects or object hierarchies.
  • Traits which allow defining behaviors and grouping them in a hierarchy separated from data and state. This separation allows us to consider behaviors which might have slight variations but otherwise present a similar interface such as the filters example that I mentioned above.

I could wax on and on about how important traits are from a design standpoint. Being able to group and “inherit” behaviors separate from data is liberating.

The mental contortions I found myself doing in a more object-oriented world are no more. Nor am I going down the “functional programming all the things” rabbit hole. Rust has a lot of both to offer but I find that its structure has led me to better designs because it has just the right amount of multiple different programming models thoughtfully mixed together.