Saturday, January 5, 2008

Tainted Love

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As much as I love a debugger, it is disheartening to need to use it to understand my code.

--Yet Another Language Geek


This is meant as an argument in favor for functional programming.

I think that moving away from an imperative statement-oriented style towards a declarative expression-oriented style does indeed help us not to fall into the vicious write-debug-circle. I mean, do you debug your SQL-expressions?

On the other hand, isn't the possibility to assemble a complex program from simplest instructions the strength of imperative languages? Is it only my brain that has repeatedly problems to wrap itself around ever growing, conceptionally twisted SQL-expressions? I thought it was a common agreement, that SQL is hard to maintain? I would put a big part of the blame on its declarative style, that does hardly allow decomposition or modularization... and I am a bit afraid of seeing mainstream application languages moving in this direction.

And somewhere out there is still lurking the danger of ready-only languages.

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