Software engineering properties of functionally enabled languages

by Gousios, Georgios

You can get a pre-print version from here.

Abstract

A new trend in programming languages and system design is the use of constructs derived from the functional language field. Startups requiring fast product turnover and large corporations looking for increased maintainability are exploring the use of new, purely functional (such as Erlang or Haskell) or functionally-enabled (such as Scala and Ruby) languages, on the basis of decreased complexity and higher productivity. Despite the apparent increase in their use, the software engineering properties, including the alleged advantages, of such languages are largely underexplored. In this paper, we discuss the issues that prohibit the use of classic complexity and productivity metrics and present the rationale behind a new set of metrics that targets this increasingly important set of languages.

Bibtex record

@techreport{Gousi11,
  author = {Gousios, Georgios},
  institution = {Athens University of Economics and Business},
  month = jan,
  title = {Software engineering properties of functionally enabled languages},
  url = {/pub/softeng-functional.pdf},
  year = {2011},
  bdsk-url-1 = {/pub/softeng-functional.pdf}
}

The paper