Does the Paradigm Matter? - Chances and Challenges for Functional Programming in Enterprise Projects

Talk at GOTO Berlin 2015:

There are a lot of religious wars in IT, about operating system, editors, spacing, and last but not least programming paradigms. But does the paradigm really matter? Why do we still discuss such questions and how can we change this?

Based on the experience from different projects, we will analyze how functional programming will affect your enterprise project, how you can use functional languages and why you should do so. Furthermore, we will look for indicators when it is definitley time to switch and what could be the problems. How can such a change getting started? How can modern language runtime like the JVM or CLR help?

Transcript

1. Does the Paradigm Matter? GOTO Berlin 2015 Silvia Schreier @aivlis_s
2. derivative of by “42” Ben Mason (CC BY 2.0)
3. Does it matter for what?
4. Successful enterprise projects
5. Successful = ?
6. Challenges
7. Functionality derivative of by “NEC-Monitor-292” NEC Corporation of America (CC BY 2.0)
8. Infrastructure derivative of by “IBM System x, Storwize, DB2 Power Viettel Mobile in Africa” j_cadmus (CC BY 2.0)
9. Productivity derivative of by “Scrum Board” barcoo (CC BY 2.0)
10. Sustainability derivative of by “trees in the morning light” Andreas Wienemann (CC BY 2.0)
11. Sustainability Evolvability Maintainability Adaptability Testability Scalability
12. Factors of influence
13. Technology derivative of by “My first punched card” Marcin Wichary (CC BY 2.0)
14. Paradigm, Language, Ecosystem
15. Example enterprise project Web application Exposing data and processes Made available through HTTP interface
16. Data-centric approach Model the data Fetch the data Do some operations on the data Send the data to the client
17. It’s all about data
18. Object-orientation a perfect match?
19. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. derivative of by “DSC_1607” Justin Baeder (CC BY 2.0)
20. So let’s try a different point of view.
21. Another approach Reading the data Aggregating and transforming the data Serializing the data
22. How does the approaches influence the project?
23. Typical OO implementation Static controllers Services with static methods Singletons Some magical request context
24. Advantages of OO Well-known (from education) Many developers feel comfortable We know how to modularize Large ecosystem
25. Disadvantages of OO Framework magic and complexity Frameworks hard to adapt Stateful & side effects vs. concurrency Building a DSL or similar is hard
26. Influence on project Functionality Infrastructure Productivity Sustainability
27. A web application ... is an object that reads a request, builds an object graph, deserializes it and sends a response. or ... is a function that transforms a request into a response.
28. That’s the switch that needs to be performed.
29. People — the other factor derivative of by “ITU Study Groups - World Café” ITU Pictures (CC BY 2.0)
30. Goal: Good and satisfied team
31. Good developer * Can apply different approaches to a problem Open-minded Puts solutions over technology Keeps it as simple as possible Has large vocabulary from different areas * an incomplete and strongly opinionated list
32. Wishes of the team Mastering a language Learning something new (every day) Aiming for simple solutions Being careful or conservative Focusing on the domain or user
33. Problems in heterogenous teams
34. Different knowledge derivative of by “Book is a treasure of knowledge....” Rupa Panda (CC BY 2.0)
35. Disagreement on ... derivative of by “'Reservoir Dogs' debate, 3 in the morning” LaVladina (CC BY 2.0)
36. How to start?
37. Choose another language for the next big project? Probably not!
38. Just changing the language will not work
39. Narrow the knowledge gap
40. Start with small tool, PoC or any other non-production code.
41. Do not change everything!
42. Which language?
43. Pairing, Reviews, Guidelines & Conventions
44. We live in a polyglot world
45. People & Technology derivative of derivative of by & by “My first punched card” Marcin Wichary “ITU Study Groups - World Café” ITU Pictures (CC BY 2.0)
46. Functionality Infrastructure Productivity Sustainability Technology People
47. derivative of by “42” Ben Mason (CC BY 2.0)
48. Maybe the people telling you that functional programming is the better paradigm are right. Maybe they are not.
49. But is it the better one for you and your project?
50. Silvia Schreier silvia.schreier@innoq.com @aivlis_s http://innoq.com Thank you! Questions?