How Enterprises Use Functional Languages, and Why They Don’t

Abstract

Logic programming and functional programming row in the same boat. Methods used to achieve success with one often transpose to the other, and both face similar obstacles. Here I offer a compendium of success stories for functional programs, followed by a list of obstacles to more widespread use of functional programming, in the belief that much of this experience is relevant to logic programmers. This material first appeared as columns in ACM SIGPLAN Notices [29, 30]. The final section contains a few remarks specific to the relations between functional and logic programming.