Candle's Procedural Design

In the previous blog, I've shared my thoughts about functional programming. Sometimes it looks like to me that procedural programmers are side-effect addicted, whereas functional programmers tend to have side-effect phobia. Hard-core functional programmers tend to spread the feelings that side-effects are evil. Yes, if the side-effects are unnecessary, then they should be eliminated by all means. But if the side-effects are desirable (by requirements), then there's nothing evil about them. There's no impurity in a program if it allows desirable side-effects.

Everyone agrees that side-effects should be controlled and carried out in a structured manner. The question is how. I think the Holy Grail of current programming language design is to find the best way to mix procedural programming with functional programming. In the following blog, I'm going to talk about the procedural design in Candle, and how it compares to similar designs in languages, like Haskell, Erlang and Clojure.