The Power of Declarative Programming

This presentation by Steve Pemberton of the W3C on declarative programming is very insightful. Thanks goes to Mark Birbeck for pointing it out. I hope we can get more students exposed to technologies like XForms much earlier in their programming careers. Take this use case. Today we give 10 students a simple assignment to create a tab menu in JavaScript we would get 10 very different programs. But if we gave them the same assignment XForms they would hopefully all use similar toggle-switch structures. This has big implications for maintenance. Hopefully there would be less temptation to recode an XForms application. Since over 50% of software is maintenance this could have long-term impacts on developer productivity.