Bottom Up Programming Question
jerf: The biology analogy immediately starts you off on the wrong foot. That has nothing to do with code.In code, a function to trim whitespace from a string is perfectly functional on its own. When you actually try to write code this way, a rather large number of things can be written, larger than you may think.Rather than write a lengthy explanation, my suggestion is to write a non-trivial program in Haskell. After that you'll better understand how it is possible to have many functions that can stand on their own, and I think this will help clarify the situation in your mind.You can do this in any other language, but most languages make it relatively easy to reach out and touch lots and lots of state. Real-world evolved systems tend to do the biological equivalent all over the place, to a level even the worst spaghetti code ever written doesn't even come close to aspiring to, and do not resemble human-engineered code in the slightest. The Haskell advantage here is that it won't let you. Achieving this in other languages right now is a chicken-and-egg problem; if you knew how to do that you wouldn't be using the metaphor you cited.(BTW, just to state it explicitly: No, I didn't directly answer your question. As others point out, it's not a very informative question. I'm going for the root of the problem, how you are conceiving of functional units in a program.)