Write Small Functions Using Examples

For example, in the game of Go there is a condition called atari in which a player’s stones may be captured by their opponent: A stone with two or more free spaces adjacent to it (called liberties) is not in atari. It can be tricky to count how many liberties a stone has, but determining atari is easy if that is known. We might begin by writing a function like this:

This is the essence of the claim that tests cannot prove the absence of bugs. Tests can demonstrate the presence of features, though. But still we have this issue of size.

This is much more tractable: The function computed is now a set with at most eight members. In fact, four checked examples would constitute evidence of complete certainty that the function is correct. This is one reason why it’s a good idea to use types closely related to the problem domain to write programs, rather than native types. Using domain–inspired types can often make our functions much smaller. One way to find out what those types should be is to find the examples to check in problem domain terms, before writing the function.