On the Revival of Dynamic Languages

Nierstrasz, Oscar; Bergel, Alexandre; Denker, Marcus; Ducasse, Sté́phane; Gälli, Markus; Wuyts, Roel

doi:10.1007/11550679_1

Cited by 27 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Despite the fact that other authors have already promoted dynamic languages as an instrument to improve flexibility (Ousterhout 1998;Nierstrasz et al 2005;Hirschi 2007), to the best of our knowledge no previous work has established precisely the relationships between the features of dynamic languages and the flexibility these languages provide.…”

Section: Final Remarks and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…For example, Nierstrasz et al (2005) claim that most languages are static in the sense that they assume the world is consistent, but in reality most complex systems cannot be consistent, and they later suggest that dynamic languages can be a good solution to this problem. This line of reasoning is consistent with our claim that dynamic languages provide better Progressive Evaluation because they allow the system to run even when it is not entirely correct or consistent.…”

Section: Triangulation With Related Workmentioning

confidence: 97%

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A qualitative human-centric evaluation of flexibility in middleware implementations

et al. 2011

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Today middleware is much more powerful, more reliable and faster than it used to be. Nevertheless, for the application developer, the complexity of using middleware platforms has increased accordingly. The volume and variety of application contexts that current middleware technologies have to support require that developers be able to anticipate the widest possible range of execution environments, desired and undesired effects of different programming strategies, handling procedures for runtime errors, and so on. This paper shows how a generic framework designed to evaluate the usability of notations (the Cognitive Dimensions of Notations Framework, or CDN) has been instantiated and used to analyze the cognitive challenges involved in adapting middleware platforms. This human-centric perspective allowed us to achieve novel results compared to existing middleware evaluation research, typically centered around system performance metrics. The focus of our study is on the process of adapting middleware implementations, rather than in the end product of this activity. Our main contributions are twofold. First, we describe a qualitative CDN-based method to analyze the cognitive effort made by programmers while adapting middleware implementations. And second, we show how two platforms Empir Software Eng (2012) 17:166-199 167 designed for flexibility have been compared, suggesting that certain programming language design features might be particularly helpful for developers.

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Section: Final Remarks and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Triangulation With Related Workmentioning

confidence: 97%

A qualitative human-centric evaluation of flexibility in middleware implementations

et al. 2011

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“…Self and Io) without bridging is another useful goal [17]. The Apple Newton showed that using a class-based language for models and a prototype-based language for views in the classic model-view-controller pattern is beneficial [20].…”

Section: Rationalementioning

confidence: 99%

A Modern Objective-C Runtime.

Chisnall¹

2009

JOT

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In light of the recent modifications to the de facto standard implementation Objective-C language by Apple Inc., the GNU Objective-C runtime lacks a number of features that are desirable for a modern implementation. This paper presents a metaobject protocol flexible enough to implement Objective-C and other languages of interest. It also presents an implementation of this model in the form of a new Objective-C runtime library which supports all of the new features of Objective-C 2.0 as well as safe inline caching, mixins, prototype-based object orientation, transparent support for other languages-including those with a prototype-based object model-and a small, maintainable code base.

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“…In previous work we have argued that evolution is enabled by highlevel composition of components [2]. We have also argued that such systems should also be dynamic, they should support reflection on-demand, and they should provide mechanisms to manage the scope of change [33]. Change should be represented as a first-class entity, and both static and dynamic models of the running applications should be available at run-time to support continuous monitoring and analysis of evolution [34].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lessons in Software Evolution Learned by Listening to Smalltalk

Nierstrasz

2010

SOFSEM 2010: Theory and Practice of Computer Science

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Abstract. The biggest challenge facing software developers today is how to gracefully evolve complex software systems in the face of changing requirements. We clearly need software systems to be more dynamic, compositional and model-centric, but instead we continue to build systems that are static, baroque and inflexible. How can we better build change-enabled systems in the future? To answer this question, we propose to look back to one of the most successful systems to support change, namely Smalltalk. We briefly introduce Smalltalk with a few simple examples, and draw some lessons for software evolution. Smalltalk's simplicity, its reflective design, and its highly dynamic nature all go a long way towards enabling change in Smalltalk applications. We then illustrate how these lessons work in practice by reviewing a number of research projects that support software evolution by exploiting Smalltalk's design. We conclude by summarizing open issues and challenges for change-enabled systems of the future.

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On the Revival of Dynamic Languages

Cited by 27 publications

References 34 publications

A qualitative human-centric evaluation of flexibility in middleware implementations

A qualitative human-centric evaluation of flexibility in middleware implementations

A Modern Objective-C Runtime.

Lessons in Software Evolution Learned by Listening to Smalltalk

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