Evaluation of the functional and object-oriented programming paradigms
L.G. Samaraweera, Rachel Harrison · ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · 1998
The importance of replication of software engineering ezperimentation to validate ezperimental results, (considered normal practice in other scientific domains) has often been overlooked.This paper presents the results of an internal replication of a case study which quantitatively investigates and compares the quality of code produced in a functional programming language, SML, with that produced in an object-oriented language, C++.Several relationships were identified between the process mettics and product metrics.In particular, several 'design-time' metrics were found to be related to features of the development process and the delivered code.Thus, it may be possible to use these design-time metrics for prediction purposes.Further analysis involved investigating the effects of software size and code reuse on 'error density', and the differences between the two paradigms in terms of programmer productivity and code understandability.This research leads the authors to believe that replication (both internal and ezternal} is an important part of software engineering ezperimentation.