Dealing comfortably with the confusion of tongues

That's the title of my invited talk at CHOOSE Forum 2010.

See the abstract below.

I just realized that I am going to meet some esteemed colleagues there: Jean Bezivin, Jean-Marie Favre, Uwe Zdun.


Abstract: Yahweh brought the confusion of tongues upon the people in the plain of Shinar because he did not like their efforts of building the Tower of Babel with its top in the heavens. In IT, we brought the confusion of tongues upon ourselves with the continuous aggregation of ideas for programming (languages), modeling (languages), domain concepts and domain-specific languages, design patterns, APIs, and so on. All this diversity makes a nontrivial software system look like the Tower of Babel—in terms of the involved complexity. That is, a nontrivial software system involves multiple technical spaces, technologies, bridges between them, and harmful amounts of software asbestos. How can IT personnel acquire the relevant skills more effectively? How would we want to prepare an undergraduate in CS for such toughness? These are the questions that we address in this talk. We put to work a combo of technology modeling, metamodeling, and megamodeling—plus a suite of well-designed examples in any lingo that we could think of. (Contrary to this abstract, the talk is going to be very technical; target audience: software engineers.)

Acknowledgment: This is joint work with Dragan Gasevic and Jean-Marie Favre. Further, I acknowledge contributions by some of my students—most notably Thomas Schmorleiz.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SWI-Prolog's Java Interface JPL

I would like to mix Java and Prolog code on a number of occasions. Together with a student of mine (Joachim Pehl), we just convinced ourselves that the JPL library of SWI-Prolog is really cool. Basically JPL allows you to call Prolog from Java and Java from Prolog. But the question is, of course, how easy is it and can you easily go back and forth . For instance, can we call Prolog from Java and call back Java from Prolog and share Java state throughout? Sure it works! PROLOG PORTION FOLLOWS % This library is all we need to call Java from Prolog :- ensure_loaded(library(jpl)). main :- % Create an object jpl_new(class([],['Test']), [], X), % Printing objects is like printing object ids write(X),nl, % Access a field of the object; happens to be static jpl_get(X, state, Y), % Prints whatever the state's value is write(Y),nl. JAVA PORTION FOLLOWS // This jar is all we need to call Prolog from Java import jpl.*; public class Test { public static int state = 0;
Read more

Lecture series on advanced (functional) programming concepts

[ Added 10 Aug 2010: Here is the link to the first lecture's video: " The Expression Problem ". ] If you are a programming nerd or something of a similar species, you may know of C9 Lectures at http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/C9+Lectures . Several of the lectures are given by Erik Meijer who has turned many chapters of Graham Hutton 's book " Programming in Haskell " into videos. In my recent, recorded lecture on " Programming Paradigms and Formal Semantics ", I also incorporated Graham's text, but you should really watch Erik's lectures, if you haven't---they are more fun. I am inspired by his ability to present relatively simple content in such a crisp, insightful, and enjoyable manner. In the aforementioned lecture, I covered all kinds of "crazy stuff" though, and in the end, I had to deliver body bags to my Bachelor students---in the form of a radically simple examination. Thanks a lot btw to @grammarware for helping with t
Read more

Should I declare defeat on the research topic of API migration?

Of course, I won't, but perhaps I should! Then, I could turn to lower-hanging fruits in research, which I first need to spot, which I can't though because I am a bit obsessed with API migration (and admittedly some other stuff such as megamodeling ). Sigh! It was around 2004 that I became interested in API migration and I have talked about it here and there ever since. Perhaps I am thinking that talking about a difficult problem of interest helps in discovering the solution of the problem, or at least a sensible path to go. Wishful thinking so far! In theory , the objective of API migration made a lot of sense while I was on the XML team at Microsoft because there are obviously way too many XML APIs. In practice , nothing happened on this front because I didn't understand automated API migration well enough back then. Add to this that API migration is something that is potentially risky for the API provider and the API migrator . So you need to mash up a rocket scientist
Read more