On Sun, Aug 18, 2013 at 10:55:00AM +0200, Heinrich Apfelmus wrote:
Philippe Sismondi wrote:
I am the original poster on this. [..] [...] At the risk of pouring fuel on the fire, I would ask: Can anyone point me to scientific studies quantifying the benefits of pure functional languages? I expect they exist, but I am interested not just in lack of errors, but in overall productivity. (It's easy to avoid program bugs: just write programs that don't do anything, or don't write any software at all.)
You know well that (1) such studies are hard to design for any language and (2) nobody asks for studies that quantify the benefits of imperative languages, simply because they happen to be the status quo.
Still, there are some interesting case studies, for instance
P Hudak and M P Jones "Haskell vs. Ada vs. C++ vs. Awk vs. ... An Experiment in Software Prototyping Productivity" http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/?post_type=publication&p=366
There are also a few articles on Erlang, and I believe there's good reason to believe the results with that language can be transferred to other "languages without assignment". - Productivity gains with Erlarng http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1362710 slides: http://is.gd/BgGZyh (behind a paywall, I haven't found a freely available copy) - Breakthrough in software design productivity through the use of declarative programming http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925527397807669 (behind a paywall, I haven't found a freely available copy) /M -- Magnus Therning OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4 email: magnus@therning.org jabber: magnus@therning.org twitter: magthe http://therning.org/magnus Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. -- Alan Kay