shorts/why_functional.tex

   1 %&pre
   2 \title{Why functional programming matters}
   3 \date{2016{--}03{--}22}
   4 \begin{document}
   5 \maketitle
   6 \subsubsection*{Summary \& Evidence}
   7 %Summary (as briefly as you can - two or three sentences)
   8 Hughes shows that because modularity is the key to successful programming
   9 functional programming offers advantages. Modularity in functional programming
  10 is easily achieved through higher-order functions and lazy evaluation.
  11
  12 %Evidence (what evidence is offered to support the claims?)
  13 Evidence is given by walking the reader through increasingly complex
  14 algorithmic implementations in a functional language. By doing so the ease of
  15 using higher-order functions and lazy evaluation in functional languages
  16 becomes clear.
  17
  18 \subsubsection*{Strengths \& Weaknesses}
  19 %Strength (what positive basis is there for publishing/reading it?)
  20 The paper is extremely readable and presents a solid case. Step by step the
  21 reader is submerged in higher order functions and abstract functional
  22 programming concepts.
  23
  24 %Weaknesses
  25 A weakness is the fact that the paper is not well embedded in existing
  26 literature. A meager six references are used. Also the paper shows the strength
  27 of modularity in measures of writing elegant code and implementing elegant
  28 algorithms but not in terms of speed
  29
  30 \subsubsection*{Evaluation}
  31 %Evaluation (if you were running the conference/journal where it was published,
  32 %would you recommend acceptance?)
  33 I would advise to publish the paper in a general computer science journal. The
  34 paper does not delve very deep in the matter and people already familiar to
  35 functional programming might find the contents trivial and self-evident.
  36
  37 %Comments on quality of writing
  38 The quality of writing is very high. The structure is clear and the paper is
  39 very readable, even without domain knowledge.
  40
  41 \subsubsection*{Discussion}
  42 %Queries for discussion
  43 \begin{itemize}
  44         \item The paper is only showing the aesthetic superiority. Is it also fast?
  45         \item How does this scale?
  46         \item Does this also scale for algorithms that use memory?
  47 \end{itemize}
  48 \end{document}