jueves, enero 20, 2005

Otro enfoque sobre la construcción de Software

Programación orientada a Lenguajes (LOP), defendido por Sergey Dmitriev, de JetBrains, explica otro paradigma para construír software. Una concepción cercana a la propuesta por Charles Simonyi: Programación Intencional.
Dice Dmitriev:

The motivation behind LOP goes something like this: I want to be able to work in terms of the concepts and notions of the problem I am trying to solve, instead of being forced to translate my ideas into the notions that a general-purpose language is able to understand (e.g. classes, methods, loops, conditionals, etc.). To achieve this, I need to use domain-specific languages. How do I get them? I create them.

I have begun development of a universal platform (the Meta Programming System) for designing domain-specific languages along with their supporting tools and environments. It will allow programmers to define languages as easily as they can write programs today. The platform will fully support LOP, giving programmers the freedom to use the most suitable language for each part of their programs, rather than tying them down to one fixed general-purpose programming language.

For me, the most serious problem is that there is a very long gap between when I know exactly how to solve a problem and when I have successfully communicated this solution to the computer as a program. I can explain the problem and solution to another programmer in a matter of hours, but encoding this solution into the computer takes much longer. This is because with a programmer I can use natural language which is very rich, but for the computer, I must use a general-purpose programming language which is much less expressive. Programming languages today have only tens of notions that can be expressed. A natural language has tens of thousands of notions which can be expressed succinctly. So, to explain a program to another programmer, I can just express very high-level ideas, but for the computer, I must express every single step and every detail. In mainstream programming, most of the time spent ‘programming’ is really just finding ways to express natural language concepts in terms of programming level abstractions, which is difficult, not very creative, and more or less a waste of time.

Una definición rápida del concepto de programación orientada a lenguajes, en el papel de M.P.Ward:
The approach starts by developing a formally specied, domain-oriented, very high-level language which is designed to be well-suited to developing this kind of program. The development process then splits into two independent stages: (1) Implement the system using this middle level language, and (2) Implement a compiler or translator or interpreter for the language, using existing technology. The approach is claimed to have advantages for domain analysis, rapid prototyping, maintenance, portability, user-enhanceable systems, reuseof development work, while also providing high development productivity.
Una crítica a LOP, que entrega más visión de contexto, en el Blog de Chris Nelson. Apuntada por el mismo Dmitriev.


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