"Functional programming languages fall under the declarative languages category, meaning algorithms are written in form of relations between steps"
The author also notes that productivity is a pro of FP. While I like much of the elegance of languages like Haskell and Lisp, its never been clear if it is actually more productive in writing real code -- and if so is it grossly more productive, or only by small margins.
The only evidence of productivity boost I know of is the following paper by Paul Hudak and Mark P. Jones: http://www.cs.yale.edu/publications/techreports/tr1049.pdf, where the conclusions seem to support the "gross improvement" hypothesis :)
In the paper, the Haskell implementations beat several other languages in multiple aspects:
- They are shorter.
- They are complete (i.e. compile and actually work).
- They include extra features.
This would seem to show Haskell is actually a pretty great language for rapid prototyping!
Unfortunately the experiment is marred by several SERIOUS flaws:
- The requirements were pretty vague, and it was pretty much up to each implementer how much to implement, and what.
- The results were self-reported. Here I trust Paul Hudak not to lie about Haskell, but it's a huge flaw in the study.
- The review board didn't attempt to execute the code, and in the case of Functional Programming, they didn't fully understand it and thought some of it was trickery (they called it "too cute for its own good").
At the end of the paper, the authors propose a new study to remedy these problems, but unfortunately it never happened as far as I know.
"Functional programming languages fall under the declarative languages category, meaning algorithms are written in form of relations between steps"
The author also notes that productivity is a pro of FP. While I like much of the elegance of languages like Haskell and Lisp, its never been clear if it is actually more productive in writing real code -- and if so is it grossly more productive, or only by small margins.