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From: pvloon@prl.philips.nl (Paul van Loon)
Subject: A new approach to software engineering!
Message-ID: <D0wsx8.6zC@prl.philips.nl>
Originator: pvloon@prl.philips.nl
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Organization: Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Date: Fri, 16 Dec 1994 15:12:44 GMT
Lines: 47
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.misc:19663 comp.programming:13576 comp.software-eng:28829 comp.ai:25985

Domain Specific Formalisms (DSFs)
---------------------------------

Within Philips Research in Eindhoven we form a group of people that
highly believe that for a lot of application domains it is time for 
a new approach to software development. We want domain experts
to generate software themselves without the need of programming
experience. To that end we have developed, and to some extent 
have experience with, an approach that is characterised by the
following aspects:
-- We don't let domain experts use a general purpose language like C, 
   Pascal or whatsoever. Per application domain we actually develop a 
   tailor made programming language (DSF) -and corresponding (graphical) 
   tool- that enables people from the domain to describe their world in 
   a form that can be used automatically for further execution without 
   the daily involvement of a software expert.
-- The domain experts concentrate on the declarative description of their 
   domain knowledge and they don't have to bother on all kinds of
   implementation hassle.
-- We make a clear distinction between the static representation part of 
   a domain, describing the abstractions with their interrelations, and
   a dynamic exploitation part, describing specific actions or tasks
   upon the representation part.
-- Reusability of domain knowledge has become possible, by connecting more 
   than one task-specific software system to this declarative description.
-- We use compiler technology to implement all of these (one front-end and 
   one or more back-ends).
-- We will use all good aspects of modern software programming techniques, 
   like object orientation, functional programming, etcetera.

Note that we don't think task-specific, but domain-specific. We believe
that in many applications large parts of the specific tasks can be
automated. Therefore a domain expert is not asked to describe a solution, 
but rather the data that is needed to generate a solution!

We would like to get feedback on this DSF approach. Therefore we are
interested in answering questions like:
Who has experience with such an approach? What was that experience? Do
you know any prototypes, or even better operational systems, build with
such an approach? What are (possible) bottlenecks in this approach?
What are relevant names and publications?

Please inform us of everything that might be of value for us. Thank you!

Reactions can be put on the net, but preferably directly mailed to:

Paul van Loon (pvloon@prl.philips.nl)
