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Seeking succnict thoughts on pros/cons of hl language styles

Assuming one can choose among: Imperative, Functional, Object-Oriented, Declarative styles (or anything else important I've missed, including sub-categories thereof e.g. is Relational a sub-category of Declarative?) of programming language, what are the pros and cons of each? Yes, I have my copy of CTM, and I'm making my way through it, but I'm hoping to find/make a list that is more succinct. :-)

I'd break that down into 3 perspectives: the theoretical; the pragmatic; and the current state-of-the-art. (E.g. "Theoretically, Haskell should be able to do XYZ, but the current compiler + runtime doesn't, although a first take on it is slated for 6.13.")

The main thing I'm trying to do is get a feeling / mental model for whatever "iron triangle/polygon" there is among the pros-cons of language style at a high level.

A small example of a factoid in this realm: OO vs. FP: OO pro is adding a new data type, con is adding a new method, whereas FP's pro is adding a new function, and the con is adding a new data type.

thank you and yes i will try to re-dig-in to CTM.

By raould at 2009-03-31 21:06 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 5632 reads

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Opinions

You're missing dataflow programming, reactive programming (including functional-reactive and rules-based reactive) and other concurrency-oriented styles (process calculi, actors model, orchestration).

I also believe declarative meta-programming deserves its own position.

I really don't wish to offer opinions here. I favor focus on language features and properties and combinations thereof. Programming styles are far too ephemeral.

By dmbarbour at Wed, 2009-04-01 00:44 | login or register to post comments

Quite a menagerie

It is indeed an arbitrarily nuanced topic. Thanks for pointing out that there is an even greater richness of possibilities to study!

By raould at Wed, 2009-04-01 17:35 | login or register to post comments

Pros and cons in CTM

If you want a quick list from CTM, check out the index. Under 'principle' there is a list of principles and under 'trade-off' there is a list of trade-offs. You can derive pros and cons from these lists. For example, your 'factoid' is listed under 'trade-off' as functional decomposition versus type decomposition.

By Peter Van Roy at Wed, 2009-04-01 13:03 | login or register to post comments

oh boy

i guess when i said i needed to read CTM i wasn't half wrong. :-} thanks!

By raould at Wed, 2009-04-01 17:33 | login or register to post comments