The Tyranny of the Vital Few: The Pareto Principle in Language Design

Victor Winter, James Perry, Harvey Siy, Satish Srinivasan, Ben Farkas, James McCoy

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DOI: 10.4236/jsea.2011.43016                

Abstract

Modern high-level programming languages often contain constructs whose semantics are non-trivial. In practice however, software developers generally restrict the use of such constructs to settings in which their semantics is simple (programmers use language constructs in ways they understand and can reason about). As a result, when developing tools for analyzing and manipulating software, a disproportionate amount of effort ends up being spent developing capabilities needed to analyze constructs in settings that are infrequently used. This paper takes the position that such distinctions between theory and practice are an important measure of the analyzability of a language.

Keywords

Java Type Resolution, Transformation, Code Migration, SCORE Processor

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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