252 papers · page 2 of 13
Two critical and interrelated questions regarding the design and study of programming languages are: 1) What does it mean to design a programming language? and 2) Why does minimal demographic diversity persist in the programming language community? In this paper, we present femin…
This essay consists of an imaginary discussion among a group of students after a computer science class, that presents some problems of (and partial solutions to) fundamental issues of program correctness.
What is simple? How can we make simple things? Simplicity seems easy to grasp but is surprisingly difficult to explain. “We know it when we see it”, but we don’t know how to describe it. This essay reflects on a number of observations about simplicity and complexity. It invites a…
Design Computation is the use of programming in the design of physical systems such as buildings and infrastructure. This involves embedding both general-purpose textual languages and domain-specific visual languages within geometry modelling and engineering applications in the c…
While visual scaffolding, live programming, and direct manipulation of the program state are considered useful programming paradigms for novices, they might not always offer the same benefits to experienced software developers. In this essay, we will use chess as a proxy for expl…
Static type checking aims to detect nonsensical operations based on their domains at compile time. While its benefits no longer need to be argued, it comes with expressiveness limitations that can only be lifted at the expense of complexity. This problem is particularly antitheti…
We apply the biological-behavioral concept of an umwelt, which is how an organism perceives and acts within its environment, to the practice of software development. By writing narrative descriptions of our own software umwelts and iteratively discussing and analyzing them, we de…
Social media provide a steady diet of dire warnings that artificial intelligence (AI) will make software engineering (SE) irrelevant or obsolete. To the contrary, the engineering discipline of software is rich and robust; it encompasses the full scope of software design, developm…
Debugging is hard. Interactive debuggers are mostly the same. They show you a stack, a way to sample the state of the stack, and, if the debugger is live, a way to step through execution. The standard interactive debugger for a general-purpose programming language provided by a m…
Programming languages have been trapped in a world of linear textual representations fundamentally unchanged for half a century. Even systems pushing beyond these forms — visual languages, projectional language workbenches, and end-user programming tools — largely ape the strictu…
Dynamic Software Updating (DSU) is a technique for updating programs without restarting them. It is useful in systems that provide live programming or in system with high availability needs. As a common limitation, existing DSU systems cannot update active functions. Hence, they …
Debuggability and optimisation are traditionally regarded as in fundamental tension. This paper disputes that idea, arguing instead that it is possible to compile programs such that they are both fully source-level-debuggable and fully optimised, and that the essential problem to…
The reactive programming paradigm has become ubiquitous for modern web and mobile app development. But despite its many benefits, today reactive programming is limited to data updates within the client, leaving to the programmer the tedious and error-prone tasks of managing updat…
In exploratory programming, programmers often face a semantic gap between their high-level understanding and the low-level interfaces available for interacting with objects in a system. That is, technical object structure and behavior need to be interpreted as abstract domain con…
The recent proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has opened up new frontiers in computational law. An exciting area of development is the use of AI to automate the deductive rule-based reasoning inhe…
Mixed integer linear programming is a powerful and widely used approach to solving optimization problems, but its expressiveness is limited. In this paper we introduce the optimization-aided language Scimitar, which encodes optimization problems using an expressive functional lan…
We present the architecture-oriented programming language Objective-S, which goes beyond procedure calls for expressing inter-component connectors (so-called glue code) in order to directly express a wide range of architectural patterns directly in the implementation. Previous ap…
Traditional, or concrete, debuggers allow developers to step through programs and explore the corresponding concrete program states—developers can query current values of program variables. This exploration enables developers to formulate and refine hypotheses about program behav…
A day in the life of a developer often involves more time working with schemas, configurations, and data description systems than writing code and logic in a classical programming language. As more systems move into distributed worlds, e.g. cloud and microservices, and developers…
The research field of end-user programming has largely been concerned with helping non-experts learn to code sufficiently well in order to achieve their tasks. Generative AI stands to obviate this entirely by allowing users to generate code from naturalistic language prompts. In …