Quantifying the Impact on Software Complexity of Composable Inductive Programming using Zoea

Abstract: Composable inductive programming as implemented in the Zoea programming language is a simple declarative approach to software development. At the language level it is evident that Zoea is significantly simpler than all mainstream languages. However, until now we have only had anecdotal evidence that software produced with Zoea is also simpler than equivalent software produced with conventional languages. This paper presents the results of a quantitative comparison of the software complexity of equivalent code implemented in Zoea and also in a conventional programming language. The study uses a varied set of programming tasks from a popular programming language chrestomathy. Results are presented for relative program complexity using two established metrics and also for relative program size. It was found that Zoea programs are approximately 50% the complexity of equivalent programs in a conventional language and on average equal in size. The results suggest that current programming languages (as opposed to software requirements) are the largest contributor to software complexity and that significant complexity could be avoided through an inductive programming approach.