David Meyer recently published a .NET class library that enables duck typing (also sometimes incorrectly described as Latent Typing as Ian Griffiths explains in his campaign to disabuse that notion) for .NET languages.

The term duck typing is popularly explained by the phrase

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.

For most dynamic languages, this phrase is slightly inaccurate in describing duck typing. To understand why, let’s take a quick look at what duck typing is about.

Duck Typing Explained

duck-rabbit-philDuck typing allows an object to be passed in to a method that expects a certain type even if it doesn’t inherit from that type. All it has to do is support the methods and properties of the expected type in use by the method.

I emphasize that last phrase for a reason. Suppose we have a method that takes in a duck instance, and another method that takes in a rabbit instance. In a dynamically typed language that supports duck typing, I can pass in my object to the first method as long as my object supports the methods and properties of duck in use by that method. Likewise, I can pass my object into the second method as long as it supports the methods and properties of rabbit called by the second method. Is my object a duck or is it a rabbit? Like the above image, it’s neither and it’s both.

In many (if not most) dynamic languages, my object does not have to support all methods and properties of duck to be passed into a method that expects a duck. Same goes for a method that expects a rabbit. It only needs to support the methods and properties of the expected type that are actually called by the method.

The Static Typed Backlash

Naturally, static typing proponents have formed a backlash against dynamic typing, claming that all hell will break loose when you give up static typing. A common reaction (and I paraphrase) to David’s duck typing project goes something like

Give me static types or give me death!

Now I love compiler checking as much as the next guy, but I don’t understand this attitude of completely dismissing a style of programming that so many are fawning over.

Well, actually I do understand…kinda. So many programmers were burned by their days of programming C (among other languages) and its type unsafety which caused many stupid runtime errors that it’s been drilled into their heads that static types are good, just, and the American way.

And for the most part, it’s true, but making this an absolute starts to smell like the monkey cage experiment in that we ignore changes in software languages and tooling that might challenge the original reasons we use static types because we’ve done it this way for so long.

I think Bruce Eckel’s thoughts on challenging preconceived notions surrounding dynamic languages are spot on (emphasis mine).

What I’m trying to get to is that in my experience there’s a balance between the value of strong static typing and the resulting impact that it makes on your productivity. The argument that “strong static is obviously better” is generally made by folks who haven’t had the experience of being dramatically more productive in an alternative language. When you have this experience, you see that the overhead of strong static typing isn’t always beneficial, because sometimes it slows you down enough that it ends up having a big impact on productivity.

The key point here is that static typing doesn’t come without a cost. And that cost has to be weighed on a case by case basis against the benefits of dynamic languages.

C# has used duck typing for a long time

Interestingly enough, certain features of C# already use duck typing. For example, to allow an object to be enumerated via the C# foreach operator, the object only needs to implement a set of methods as Krzystof Cwalina of Microsoft points out in this post

Provide a public method GetEnumerator that takes no parameters and returns a type that has two members: a) a method MoveNext that takes no parameters and return a Boolean, and b) a property Current with a getter that returns an Object.

You don’t have to implement an interface to make your object enumerable via the foreach operator.

 

A Very Useful Use Case For When You Might Use Duck Typing

 

If you’ve followed my blog at all, you know that I’ve gone through all sorts of contortions to try and mock the HttpContext object via the HttpSimulator class. The problem is that I can’t use a mock framework because HttpContext is a sealed class and it doesn’t implement an interface that is useful to me.

Not only that, but the properties of HttpContext I’m interested in (such as Request and Response) are sealed classes (HttpRequest and HttpResponse respectively). This makes it awful challenging to mock these objects for testing. More importantly, it makes it hard to switch to a different type of context should I want to reuse a class in a different context such as the command line. Code that uses these classes have a strong dependency on these classes and I’d prefer looser coupling to the System.Web assembly.

The common approach to breaking this dependency is to create your own IContext interface and then create another class that implements that interface and essentially forwards method calls to an internal private instance of the actual HttpContext. This is effectively a combination of the composition and adapter pattern.

The problem for me is this is a lot more code to maintain just to get around the constraints caused by static typing. Is all this additional code worth the headache?

With the .NET Duck Typing class, I can reduce the code by a bit. Here’s some code that demonstrates. First I create interfaces with the properties I’m interested. In order to keep this sample short, I’m choosing two interfaces each with one property..

public interface IHttpContext
{
  IHttpRequest Request { get;}
}

public interface IHttpRequest
{
  Uri Url { get;}
}

Now suppose my code had a method that expects an HttpContext to be passed in, thus tightly coupling our code to HttpContext. We can break that dependency by changing that method to take in an instance of the interface we created, IHttpContext, instead.

public void MyMethod(IHttpContext context)
{
  Console.WriteLine(context.Request.Url);
}

The caller of MyMethod can now pass in the real HttpContext to this method like so…

IHttpContext context = DuckTyping.Cast<IHttpContext>(HttpContext.Current);
MyMethod(context);

What’s great about this is that the code that contains the MyMethod method is no longer tightly coupled to the System.Web code and does not need to reference that assembly. Also, I didn’t have to write a class that implements the IHttpContext interface and wraps and forwards calls to the private HttpContext instance, saving me a lot of typing (no pun intended).

Should I decide at a later point to pass in a custom implementation of IHttpContext rather than the one in System.Web, I now have that option.

Yet another benefit is that I can now test MyMethod using a mock framework such as RhinoMocks like so…

MockRepository mocks = new MockRepository();
IHttpContext mockContext;
using (mocks.Record())
{
  mockContext = mocks.DynamicMock<IHttpContext>();
  IHttpRequest request = mocks.DynamicMock<IHttpRequest>();
  SetupResult.For(mockContext.Request).Return(request);
  SetupResult.For(request.Url).Return(new Uri("https://haacked.com/"));
}
using (mocks.Playback())
{
  MyMethod(mockContext);
}

You might wonder if I can go the opposite direction. Can I write my own version of HttpContext and using duck typing cast it to HttpContext? I tried that and it didn’t work. I believe that’s because HttpContext is a sealed class and I think the Duck Typing Project generates a dynamic proxy that inherits from the type you pass in. Since we can’t inherit from a sealed class, we can’t simply cast a compatible type to HttpContext. The above examples work because we’re duck type casting to an interface.

With C#, if you need a class you’re writing to act like both a duck and a rabbit, it makes sense to implement those interfaces. But sometimes you need a class you didn’t write and cannot change (such as the Base Class Libraries) to act like a duck. In that case, this duck typing framework is a useful tool in your toolbox.