Introducing Labrea: How Embracing Declarative, Functional Programming Can Lead You Out of the Tar Pit

As a multi-paradigm language, Python gives its users the freedom to solve problems in a vast number of ways. However, this freedom comes with a cost: we must resist the urge to use quick, unsustainable approaches in order to avoid the plague that is software complexity. For many real world problems, using familiar techniques like mutable state and imperative programming make it easier to complete the task while yielding a more complex codebase. In many cases, functional programming offers a way to write simpler code, but the difficulty of committing to it makes it impractical or unappealing to developers.

Inspired by the 2006 paper Out of the Tar Pit, and the 2011 talk Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey, Labrea is a Python framework that seeks to make the happy path one that results in a simpler codebase that is functional, declarative, and composable. Learn about how Labrea allowed developers at 84.51º (Kroger) to pull the company's most complicated coupon recommender system out of the slow death march of software complexity, and how it might help you.