Lambda the Ultimate

Testing Telecoms Software with Quviq QuickCheck by John Hughes, Thomas Arts, Joakim Johansson, Ulf Wiger.

We present a case study in which a novel testing tool, Quviq QuickCheck, is used to test an industrial implementation of the Megaco protocol. We considered positive and negative testing and we used our developed specification to test an old version in order to estimate how useful QuickCheck could potentially be when used early in development.The results of the case study indicate that, by using Quviq QuickCheck, we would have been able to detect faults early in the development.We detected faults that had not been detected by other testing techniques. We found unclarities in the specifications and potential faults when the software is used in a different setting. The results are considered promising enough to Ericsson that they are investing in an even larger case study, this time from the beginning of the development of a new product.

That's right, the illustrious John Hughes is dropping out of school to do an Erlang startup!

When I encountered discussions about OO vs FP on LtU the first time my immediate response was that FP likely doesn't lack anything technology-wise but something essentially different: a discourse about modeling and design that is devoid of implementation or PL feature considerations but mostly strategic. A strategic approach is for instance object oriented analysis and design: start with a decomposition of a system into objects. Identify their responsibilities and relationships ( modularization / class diagrams ), their behaviour and interactions ( methods ) and their properties ( member variables ). The choice of a projects programming language is than influenced by its attitude to embrace the design/modeling strategy and not by other considerations that are secondary to this process: whether it favours recursion over iteration or enables the compiler to safely exploit cute little identities among combinators granted by referential transparency.

There has been a funny polemics by Steve Yegge some time ago about Java as the kingdom of nouns that caricatures the obsession of subordinating verbs ( functions ) under nouns ( objects ). The only immediate inversion of this subordination I'm aware of is that of category theory but I didn't notice yet a push of "general abstract nonsense" into a handy toolset that guides the programmer from customer requirements to program code. At the moment FP is advocated in terms of compensations or vagueries. It improves your quality as a programmer even when you write code in Java or C++ and it is "mind expanding" ( whatever this means ) or it is praised as the future of programming because once again it simplifies the life of compiler authors to deal with parallelism. It's always hard to distiguish hope from defiancy.

What do you think, are there approaches to transcend the current state by envisioning a new "big picture" or am I'm just wrong in my analysis and so deeply brainwashed by my education that I overlooked the obvious and eternal truth? In the latter case I would be grateful about a "mind expansion".