Empirical evidence for choice of programming paradigm to address a problem
- by Graham Lee
The C2 wiki has a discussion of Empirical Evidence for Object-Oriented Programming that basically concludes there is none beyond appeal to authority. This was last edited in 2008. Discussion here seems to bear this out: questions on whether OO is outdated, when functional programming is a bad choice and the advantages and disadvantages of AOP are all answered with contributors' opinions without reliance on evidence.
Of course, opinions of established and reputed practitioners are welcome and valuable things to have, but they're more plausible when they're consistent with experimental data. Does this evidence exist? Is evidence-based software engineering a thing? Specifically, if I have a particular problem P that I want to solve by writing software, does there exist a body of knowledge, studies and research that would let me see how the outcome of solving problems like P has depended on the choice of programming paradigm?
I know that which paradigm comes out as "the right answer" can depend on what metrics a particular study pays attention to, on what conditions the study holds constant or varies, and doubtless on other factors too. That doesn't affect my desire to find this information and critically appraise it.
It becomes clear that some people think I'm looking for a "turn the crank" solution - some sausage machine into which I put information about my problem and out of which comes a word like "functional" or "structured". This is not my intention. What I'm looking for is research into how - with a lot of caveats and assumptions that I'm not going into here but good literature on the matter would - certain properties of software vary depending on the problem and the choice of paradigm.
In other words: some people say "OO gives better flexibility" or "functional programs have fewer bugs" - (part of) what I'm asking for is the evidence of this. The rest is asking for evidence against this, or the assumptions under which these statements are true, or evidence showing that these considerations aren't important. There are plenty of opinions on why one paradigm is better than another; is there anything objective behind any of these?
