Mon 26 Oct 2015 14:20 - 14:33 at Grand Station 5 - Programming Languages Papers Chair(s): Joshua Sunshine

In 1989 John Hughes published an influential position paper entitled “Why Functional Programming Matters”. The article extolls the virtues of lazy functional programming by developing several examples: the Newton-Rhapson squares root method, numerical differentiation and integration, and an alpha-beta minimax search. A main conclusion of that work is that higher-order functions and lazy evaluation significantly contribute to modularity. We have found that recent articles from 2010 to 2014 cite Hughes’ work as seminal work supporting that functional programming is, in general, good for modularity. We believe that this reflects an unstated hypothesis in part of the research community: that functional programming is inherently better at modularity. To the best of our knowledge there are no (large-scale) empirical evaluations of this characteristic. In this paper we discuss the influence of “Why Functional Programming Matters”, the recent citations that intrigues us, and provide a small experiment on the GHC Haskell compiler that suggest the existence of modularity issues in it, prompting the need for further research.

Is Functional Programming Better for Modularity? (plateau2015-figueroa.pdf)374KiB

Mon 26 Oct

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

13:30 - 15:00
Programming Languages PapersPLATEAU at Grand Station 5
Chair(s): Joshua Sunshine Carnegie Mellon University
13:30
20m
Talk
A user study for comparing the programming efficiency of modifying executable multimodal interaction descriptions. A domain-specific language versus equivalent event-callback code
PLATEAU
Fredy Cuenca Hasselt University - tUL - iMinds, Jan Van den Bergh Hasselt University - tUL - iMinds, Kris Luyten Hasselt University - tUL - iMinds, Karin Coninx Hasselt University - tUL - iMinds
File Attached
13:50
20m
Talk
A Study on the Most Popular Questions About Concurrent Programming
PLATEAU
Gustavo Pinto UFPE, Weslley Torres Federal University of Pernambuco, Fernando Castor UFPE
File Attached
14:10
10m
Talk
Comparing Transitive to Intransitive Object Immutability
PLATEAU
Michael Coblenz Carnegie Mellon University, Joshua Sunshine Carnegie Mellon University, Brad A. Myers Carnegie Mellon University, Sam Weber Software Engineering Institute, Forrest Shull Software Engineering Institute
File Attached
14:20
13m
Talk
Is Functional Programming Better for Modularity?
PLATEAU
Ismael Figueroa Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile, Romain Robbes University of Chile
File Attached
14:33
13m
Talk
Operators and precedence in programming languages
PLATEAU
Najwani Razali Victoria University of Wellington, James Noble Victoria University of Wellington, Stuart Marshall Victoria University of Wellington
File Attached
14:46
13m
Talk
Some Usability Hypotheses for Verification
PLATEAU
David J. Pearce Victoria University of Wellington
File Attached