Comment by markusschlegel

As an argument in favor of pure functions, functional programmers often cite better testability: pure functions require no complicated test setup or mocks, are deterministic, parallelizable, etc. In tendency, this is certainly correct. Pure functions are often better suited for testing than their impure counterparts. However, this connection is not a neccessary implication in either direction: There are pure functions that are hard to test, and there are impure functions that are easy to test. Thus purity itself cannot be the substance that ensures a piece of program is properly testable. But then what is this substance?