An Empirical Study on the Possible Positive Effect of Imperative Constructs in Declarative Languages: The Case with SQL

Seyfullah Davulcu, Stefan Hanenberg, Ole Werger, Volker Gruhn

2023

Abstract

Today, imperative programming languages are often equipped with declarative constructs (such as lambda expressions in Java or C++). The underlying assumption (which is partly confirmed by experiments) is that imperative languages benefit from such constructs. This gives the impression that declarative programming languages are better suited for programming than imperative languages. However, the question is whether this statement holds vice versa as well, i.e., whether declarative languages benefit from imperative constructs. The present paper introduces a crossover trial where 24 students were equipped with an SQL extension that gives the illusion of imperative assignments. It turned out with high confidence (p<.001) that this construct -- although in principle already contained in a declarative fashion in SQL -- lets students solve a given task in only 52% of the time in comparison to the time required in standard SQL.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Davulcu S., Hanenberg S., Werger O. and Gruhn V. (2023). An Empirical Study on the Possible Positive Effect of Imperative Constructs in Declarative Languages: The Case with SQL. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT; ISBN 978-989-758-665-1, SciTePress, pages 428-437. DOI: 10.5220/0012092300003538

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icsoft23,
author={Seyfullah Davulcu and Stefan Hanenberg and Ole Werger and Volker Gruhn},
title={An Empirical Study on the Possible Positive Effect of Imperative Constructs in Declarative Languages: The Case with SQL},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT},
year={2023},
pages={428-437},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0012092300003538},
isbn={978-989-758-665-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT
TI - An Empirical Study on the Possible Positive Effect of Imperative Constructs in Declarative Languages: The Case with SQL
SN - 978-989-758-665-1
AU - Davulcu S.
AU - Hanenberg S.
AU - Werger O.
AU - Gruhn V.
PY - 2023
SP - 428
EP - 437
DO - 10.5220/0012092300003538
PB - SciTePress