A Discussion on Imperative vs. Declarative Programming
I received the following question (paraphrased) this week:
“You are an advocate of converting imperative style programming into re-usable frameworks as you did in your November VS Magazine column. I agree from a developer’s perspective. But, one thought that came to mind is the imperative style is quicker to grasp from a maintainer’s perspective because the code is in one place in contrast to several little functions that need to be pieced together. Is your thinking that once the framework of functions is setup and re-used, then a maintainer only has to learn it once and subsequently the idiom is quickly recognized? Effectively, there is a high cost the first time the idiom is encountered but then the future cost is lower?”
Actually, I think the imperative code seems easier to maintain because we’ve all seen so much more of it. That’s probably even more true case of maintenance developers. Only some of our universities discuss declarative programming languages. There’s even less declarative programming in products and enterprise projects these days. Declarative programming is unfamiliar to many of the professional developers writing code today.
In our regular day to day jobs, it’s not that what we do is incredibly hard. What makes some tasks feel hard is that we are unfamiliar with the tools or the task. Declarative program is one of possible tools that most developers are likely to avoid, because it is very unfamiliar. That’s a shame (in my opinion) because forcing yourself to think in different ways will make you a better software engineer. Furthermore, the problem you describe above will go away. The more exposure that developers have to declarative programming, the easier it will be to understand it and maintain it.
On your specific concern, I honestly think that the declarative style makes it clearer to see exactly what each function does. Those smaller, simpler functions are easier to understand. In my opinion, that makes it easier to understand larger algorithms composed of these smaller functions.