Lambda the Ultimate

The 2003 proceedings from the Workshop on Declarative Programming in the Context of OO Languages are available for download. There is a sister conference this October. Sponsors are the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the John von Neumann Institute for Computing. One of the papers describes new features in the recent 1.5 release of FC++.

Declarative programming is appealing for its purity, clarity, and high levels of abstraction, but it is a reality that most real-world software development is done in object-oriented languages, primarily C++ and Java.

Proponents of declarative programming have demonstrated, particularly in the case of functional languages, that most of the benefits and features of object-oriented programming may be more or less readily realized and expressed in declarative languages. While this attests to the expressive power of such languages it has yet to convert the industry from mainstream OO languages, and seems unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future.

A complementary approach to realizing the benefits of declarative programming is to express the paradigms it represents in existing OO languages. Significant work has been done, for example, in expressing non-strict FP in C++, and similarly for Java (in particular by extending the language).