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There are the Architecture Description Languages, but they only describe, so you have to do the additional work of describing the architecture, and then program

There are the Architecture Description Languages, but they only describe, so you have to do the additional work of describing the architecture, and then program it conventionally. Not very appealing and they never really took off. Unicon was one of the first projects I am aware of that tried to generate code: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~Vit/unicon/reference-manual/Reference_Manual_1.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~Vit/unicon/reference-manual/Referenc... It is also the system that made me see the connection between architectural elements (connectors/components) and the elements of a programming language, the language's meta-model. ArchJava ist the only attempt so far to add a connector abstraction to an existing programming language: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~andre/informatics223s2009/aldrichchambersnotkin.pdf https://www.ics.uci.edu/~andre/informatics223s2009/aldrichch... But since "connector" is a generalisation of "procedure/function/method call", you can't really just add connectors to an existing language, you have to generalise. Which is what I am doing with Objective-S: http://objective.st http://objective.st (And no, the ObjS web-site is currently not very good at all. But it is being served by ObjS and can stand up to a HN hug of death, so at least something...)

magicalhippo 4y ago
Thanks, UniCon certainly looks interesting. I did briefly look at Objective-S as well, but I'm not familiar with Scheme from before so will need more time to get a feel for how it works in practice. You can get a lot of the advantages of this clear split in a regular language like C#, but I agree that a dedicated one probably can get you some synergies that are otherwise lost.
- mpweiher 4y ago
  > You can get a lot of the advantages of this clear split in a regular language like C# Absolutely! It's just not at all obvious and thus difficult to accomplish or do well. You need to have a very clear model of the solution in your head that you then encode very differently in your language of choice. And once it's encoded, it's very difficult to recover that clear/simple model that only exists in your head, both for yourself and even more so for future maintainers. Meaning it will probably degrade more or less rapidly over time. Linguistic support should make this much more straightforward, as you can just write down the model you had in your head. Or at least much more of it.

magicalhippo 4y ago

Thanks, UniCon certainly looks interesting. I did briefly look at Objective-S as well, but I'm not familiar with Scheme from before so will need more time to get a feel for how it works in practice. You can get a lot of the advantages of this clear split in a regular language like C#, but I agree that a dedicated one probably can get you some synergies that are otherwise lost.

mpweiher 4y ago
> You can get a lot of the advantages of this clear split in a regular language like C# Absolutely! It's just not at all obvious and thus difficult to accomplish or do well. You need to have a very clear model of the solution in your head that you then encode very differently in your language of choice. And once it's encoded, it's very difficult to recover that clear/simple model that only exists in your head, both for yourself and even more so for future maintainers. Meaning it will probably degrade more or less rapidly over time. Linguistic support should make this much more straightforward, as you can just write down the model you had in your head. Or at least much more of it.