Programming language "laws"

As is pretty typical for that site, Lambda the Ultimate has a great discussion on some insights that the creators of Mozart and Oz have come to, regarding the design of programming languages; I repeat the post here for convenience:

Now that we are close to releasing Mozart 2 (a complete redesign of the Mozart system), I have been thinking about how best to summarize the lessons we learned about programming paradigms in CTM. Here are five "laws" that summarize these lessons:
  1. A well-designed program uses the right concepts, and the paradigm follows from the concepts that are used. [Paradigms are epiphenomena]
  2. A paradigm with more concepts than another is not better or worse, just different. [Paradigm paradox]
  3. Each problem has a best paradigm in which to program it; a paradigm with less concepts makes the program more complicated and a paradigm with more concepts makes reasoning more complicated. [Best paradigm principle]
  4. If a program is complicated for reasons unrelated to the problem being solved, then a new concept should be added to the paradigm. [Creative extension principle]
  5. A program's interface should depend only on its externally visible functionality, not on the paradigm used to implement it. [Model independence principle]
Here a "paradigm" is defined as a formal system that defines how computations are done and that leads to a set of techniques for programming and reasoning about programs. Some commonly used paradigms are called functional programming, object-oriented programming, and logic programming. The term "best paradigm" can have different meanings depending on the ultimate goal of the programming project; it usually refers to a paradigm that maximizes some combination of good properties such as clarity, provability, maintainability, efficiency, and extensibility. I am curious to see what the LtU community thinks of these laws and their formulation.

This just so neatly calls out to me, based on my own very brief and very informal investigation into multi-paradigm programming (based on James Coplien's work from C++ from a decade-plus ago). I think they really have something interesting here. >

Enterprise consulting, mentoring or instruction. Java, C++, .NET or XML services. 1-day or multi-day workshops available. Contact me for details.

This story, "Programming language "laws"" was originally published by JavaWorld.

Next read this:

Ted Neward is an independent consultant specializing in high-scale enterprise systems, working with clients ranging in size from Fortune 500 corporations to small 10-person shops. He is an authority in Java and .NET technologies, particularly in the areas of Java/.NET integration (both in-process and via integration tools like Web services), back-end enterprise software systems, and virtual machine/execution engine plumbing. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, two sons, and eight PCs.

Copyright © 2013 IDG Communications, Inc.