Why Functional Programming Matters.

Hughes, J. (1989). Why Functional Programming Matters. The Computer Journal, 32(2), 98-107.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1989

DOI

10.1093/comjnl/32.2.98

Link

https://doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/32.2.98

Cited from

computer_science, logistics_supply_chain, operations_research

Cited by

3 citations across 3 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Lazy Evaluation
  • The eager trade-off is exact and visible — eager evaluation of an infinite list would not terminate at all, so here laziness is not an optimisation but an enabling condition

    This sourceArgues that lazy evaluation is an enabling (not merely optimizing) condition — it makes infinite data structures and demand-driven generate-and-select composition tractable.

• Postponement
  • The separable decision and commitment is the distinction between constructing an expression and evaluating it: in a lazy language, writing let xs = map expensive [1..1000000] decides what xs is without committing to compute any element.

    This sourceArgues that lazy evaluation defers computation until demand arrives, enabling modular separation of generation from selection.

• Pull Flow
  • Software — lazy evaluation, on-demand serverless compute, and pull-based stream subscription versus eager evaluation, scheduled batch jobs, and prefetching.

    This sourceArgues that lazy (demand-driven) evaluation produces output only when a consumer demands it — the software analogue of consumer-pull activation, versus eager (producer-paced) evaluation.

Verification

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