A recurring theme has emerged in what I’ve been reading the last few days. It boils down to the differences between software based on a clean, logical algorithm, and software based on arbitrary rules.

The topic first arose in a conversation I was having with Chris Conway over at Code Reads, exploring the pros and cons of functional programming. Chris said that he used FP every day, programming in OCaml, and loved it. It wondered if the reason he loved FP so much and I found it so unappealing was that he spent a lot of time working on problems that had elegant algorithmic solutions, whereas I spent so much time working on code that was (comparatively) a hodge-podge of arbitrary rules. This difference seemed to me to be a key distinction between “academic” and “business” software. Chris did not agree with me, or perhaps simply thought other factors (performance and library availability), were more important. We left it at that.

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The 1977 Turing Award went to John Backus, and in his Turing Lecture, “Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?”, he made a vigorous case against traditional “von Neumann” programming (VNP), and for functional programming (FP). Unfortunately, the vigorous rhetorical style of this paper has infused the discussion of FP, resulting in countless flame wars over the last 30 years. The overly broad and weakly supported statements that make up the bulk of the discussion often boil down to these:

“Traditional programming languages are clumsy. FP will solve all your problems, if only you are smart enough to use it.”

versus

“FP is a toy. Nobody has done any real work with it, so it must be useless.”

Both sides are throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and the good ideas of FP are tainted by their association with their more problematic brethren.
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