The Software Association of Oregon (SAO) is having an event this Thursday on "Declarative Programming." I had blogged about this previously. The speakers will be a couple good friends, Jason Mauer and Stuart Celarier. I whole-heartedly recommend attending this. The event will be held at the Microsoft Offices in Tigard, and will be during lunchtime. I've never been disappointed by a presentation where either Jason or Stuart was the speaker. If you can make it down there, again, I whole-heartedly recommend it. The cost is $25 if your company is not an SAO member, and $15 if it is.
If your company produces software and they are not an SAO member, why is that the case? I advise you to learn more about the benefits of SAO membership. Pop Art was an SAO member while I was there (I believe they still are). White Horse is not an SAO member, at least not yet. I've included the meeting abstract below. Again, if you can work it into your lunch schedule I highly recommend this.
Functional or declarative programming languages like Lisp (1958), SQL and ML (both late 1970s), and Haskell (1990) are not new, so what's fueling the recent resurgence of interest in declarative programming concepts? Examples of this reemergence include Microsoft's Language INtegrated Query (LINQ) and F#. Declarative programming is manifest in Java annotations and .NET attributes, as well as Windows Workflow Foundation. Functional languages have strongly influenced programmable spreadsheets and XSLT.
Anders Hejlsberg, Microsoft C# architect, formerly with Borland, has said that innovation in imperative, procedural languages has run out of steam, and as an industry we must look to declarative (or functional) programming concepts to take software languages and tools to the next level. Historically, functional programming languages have not enjoyed broad adoption due to their different approaches to solving problems.
What does this mean for us as software developers? Is this the beginning of the end for procedural programming? Or will we see a blend of different approaches that play to the strengths of each discipline? What's the current state of the art, and where are we headed?