[Haskell-cafe] FP and Quality

[PR Stanley]

Thanks, keep the tips coming. I like the ones about the type safety 
and line counts.
Cheers,
Paul
At 23:33 04/02/2008, you wrote:
>Good luck with this - I'd love to see the outcome.
>
>My experience is that FP tends to result in a lot less code, so if 
>there are x
>bugs per line of code, FP has less bugs per complete application.
>
>Talking about haskell, the typesystem dissalows whole classes of bugs. Things
>simply do not compile if you stitch the innards together in the wrong order
>(particuarly if you are agressive about using the most general types
>possible). Since this accounts for perhaps 90% of where I do things wrong in
>Java, I get a corresponding decrease in run-time bugs in haskell. However,
>this is somewhat compensated for by the effort needed to get haskell programs
>through the compiler in the first place - debug at compile or debug at
>runtime is the tradeoff here.
>
>FP is easier to verify mechanically than imperative programming - more of the
>logic is exposed directly. It's easier to do by-case proofs, even if they are
>by-hand rather than mechanical.
>
>However, all of this is annecdotal. Good luck collecting real stats, or
>peer-reviewed annecdotes. You may have luck looking at bug-fix times vs
>number of developers for equivalent FP and Java apps/libs. Worth a shot,
>given that the bug-trackers tend to be public. You could probably tie it back
>to the size of the 'fix' patches. Get some nice graphs?
>
>Matthew
>
>On Monday 04 February 2008, you wrote:
> > Hi folks
> > I'm thinking of writing a little essay arguing the case for the
> > advantages of FP for producing quality software. Can the list
> > recommend any papers/articles which I can use as sources of my
> > argument? I have access to the IEEE database too although earlier I
> > couldn't find anything on the subject.
> > Thanks, Paul
> >
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