Steven Pemberton gave a talk at FXPAL today where he talked about the virtues of declarative programming, and specifically about XForms. He cited some interesting statistics about the incidence of errors as a function of the size of the program, including the observation by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man Month that the number of bugs increases as L^1.5. So the way to increase the reliability of code is to reduce the amount of code that has to be written to achieve a particular result. Declarative programming, Steven argues, is an improvement over its predecessors (high-level programming languages, and interpreted programming languages) because declarative programming focuses the programmer’s attention on the application logic and dispenses with worrying about the “fiddly bits.”

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