SEFUNC · Software Engineering Properties of Functionally Enabled Languages

A new trend in programming languages and system design is the use of constructsderived from the functional language field. Owning to a variety of inherentcharacteristics, functionally enabled languages are emerging as a competentalternative to object-orientation in environments requiring fast developmentturnover. Despite the apparent increase in their use, the software engineeringproperties, including the alleged advantages, of such languages are largelyunexplored. With the proposed project, I aim to investigate whether thefunctional characteristics present in modern languages improve developerproductivity and reduce code complexity, by designing tools and methodsthat will allow me to empirically assess existing applications.On the software complexity front, Ipropose the design of a new metric that unifies complexity estimation infunctional and imperative environments. On the productivity front, I proposefunctional equivalents as a way to compare developer expressiveness betweenprogramming languages. In addition to the research targets, the projectcomplements my long term objective to achieve research independence, byenabling my move to a different working environment and allowing me to receivetraining in career advancement fields, such as research leadership andteaching. The project has a target duration of 18 months and will be executedat TU Delft, with guidance provided by Prof. Arie van Deursen.