[Gllug] Trends in programming (was: long thread about anything)

[salsaman at xs4all.nl]

On Wed, November 10, 2010 19:08, Walter Stanish wrote:
>>> Well call me impatient but I'd rather someone summarised those nuggets
>>> for me in a short blog post,
>>
>> Here's a few:
>> http://camltastic.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-can-ocaml-do-that-you-cant-do-in.html
>
> Followed a link there and learned that OCaml is derived from ML, which
> was itself invented by Robin Milner, a Turing award recipient and UK
> academic.
>
> Sadly he passed away in March this year, which is a real shame, since
> we may have met otherwise... I presented at a conference there later in
> the year that had some of the few people in the world who it can be
> said definitively are commercially tackling the same ideas he seemed
> to be working on mathematically: 'Code Generation 2010'.
>
> A really interesting group of people, there were representatives from the
> Open
> Group (creators of UML), commercial model driven software development
> "modelling software" vendors, academics and industry people.  There seemed
> to be a sense that, as 'believers' in code generation, everyone was on
> safe
> and common ground, ground that is normally hard to find as "Redefine your
> entire software development process." isn't exactly the easiest sell in
> most
> organisations.  An interesting conference, one for which I had absolutely
> no particular expectations and was pleasantly surprised.
>
> Anyway, in Mr. Milner's archived site at
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rm135/
> he states: "to understand Ubiquitous Computing we must make more
> systematic
> use of models, which are increasingly common in our discipline. This
> strand is
> not mathematical, but proposes how models can form a hierarchy, allowing
> them to be combined and higher models to explain lower ones."
>
> This is really the essence of programming.  However, because the
> classical 'stored program and CPU' computing model of the 'von Neumann
> Machine' (really of Turing's conception) is largely broken for today's
> focus
> on parallel systems, Mr. Milner was working on a solution, "a rigorous
> mathematical  model, based on Bigraphs. It is proposed as a platform on
> which to build more abstract models, especially for Ubiquitous Computing.
> It can be considered an abstract machine, called the Ubiquitous Abstract
> Machine. In contrast with the von Neumann machine, it models the
> concurrent and interactive behaviour of populations of mobile
> communicating agents."
>
> So - on the questions...
>
> Is higher level modelling going to become a trend in computing?  Has UML
> failed to deliver?  Are its failings really its own, or are they inherent
> in
> modelling itself?  Does all modelling break at a certain degree of
> complexity?
> Is visual logic expressive enough?  How come models are never complete?

* Ooh ! Ooh ! I know - because to be complete, a model would have to model
itself, which is a mathematical impossibility...

> Isn't a model just a program that doesn't have to answer to execution?
> Are DSLs (domain specific languages) the answer?  Aren't most general
> libraries simply a DSL with less language features and more pragmatism?
> What do the language features add?  And *is all this really helping us to
> solve problems any faster*?  What does the history of the development
> of mathematical notation tell us about our ability to use new models to
> reason with entirely new problem spaces?  Are all languages just
> mental crutches doomed forever to incompletely approximate perfect
> systems of thought? Why do all the great mathematicians go mad?

Mostly because of * above ?


But seriously, models can be very helpful, but they were all that was
needed, we would all be programming in openLDAP.


Salsaman.


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