research-article

Liberating the programmer with prorogued programming

Authors:

Mehrdad Afshari,

Zhendong SuAuthors Info & Claims

Onward! 2012: Proceedings of the ACM international symposium on New ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming and software

Pages 11 - 26

https://doi.org/10.1145/2384592.2384595

Published: 19 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Programming is the process of expressing and refining ideas in a programming language. Ideally, we want our programming language to flexibly fit our natural thought process. Language innovations, such as procedural abstraction, object and aspect orientation, have helped increase programming agility. However, they still lack important features that a programmer could exploit to quickly experiment with design and implementation choices.

We propose prorogued programming, a new paradigm more closely aligned with a programmer's thought process. A prorogued programming language (PPL) supports three basic principles: 1) proroguing concerns: the ability to defer a concern, to focus on and finish the current concern; 2) hybrid computation: the ability to involve the programmer as an integral part of computation; and 3) executable refinement: the ability to execute any intermediate program refinements. Working in a PPL, the programmer can run and experiment with an incomplete program, and gradually and iteratively reify the missing parts while catching design and implementation mistakes early. We describe the prorogued programming paradigm, our design and realization of the paradigm using Prorogued C#, our extension to C#, and demonstrate its utility through a few use cases.

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Cited By

Marron MDig DBryksin TGolubev YBezzubov A(2024)A New Generation of Intelligent Development EnvironmentsProceedings of the 1st ACM/IEEE Workshop on Integrated Development Environments10.1145/3643796.3648452(43-46)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643796.3648452
Omar CVoysey IChugh RHammer M(2019)Live functional programming with typed holesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/32903273:POPL(1-32)Online publication date: 2-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3290327
Emerich JVisser EMurphy-Hill ELopes C(2016)How are programs found? speculating about language ergonomics with Curry-HowardProceedings of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/2986012.2986030(212-223)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2986012.2986030
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Liberating the programmer with prorogued programming
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Software implementation planning
        Software design techniques
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Development frameworks and environments
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Modules / packages
        Procedures, functions and subroutines
      2. Language types
        Imperative languages

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cover image ACM Conferences

Onward! 2012: Proceedings of the ACM international symposium on New ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming and software

October 2012

258 pages

ISBN:9781450315623

DOI:10.1145/2384592

General Chair:
Gary T. Leavens
University of Central Florida
,
Program Chair:
Jonathan Edwards
MIT

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

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Published: 19 October 2012

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SPLASH '12

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SIGPLAN

SPLASH '12: Conference on Systems, Programming, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 19 - 26, 2012

Arizona, Tucson, USA

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Onward! 2012 Paper Acceptance Rate 13 of 43 submissions, 30%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 40 of 105 submissions, 38%

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Cited By

Marron MDig DBryksin TGolubev YBezzubov A(2024)A New Generation of Intelligent Development EnvironmentsProceedings of the 1st ACM/IEEE Workshop on Integrated Development Environments10.1145/3643796.3648452(43-46)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643796.3648452
Omar CVoysey IChugh RHammer M(2019)Live functional programming with typed holesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/32903273:POPL(1-32)Online publication date: 2-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3290327
Emerich JVisser EMurphy-Hill ELopes C(2016)How are programs found? speculating about language ergonomics with Curry-HowardProceedings of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/2986012.2986030(212-223)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2986012.2986030
Afshari MSu ZVisser EMurphy-Hill ELopes C(2016)Building white-box abstractions by program refinementProceedings of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/2986012.2986025(74-81)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2986012.2986025
Barr EHarman MMcMinn PShahbaz MShin Yoo (2015)The Oracle Problem in Software Testing: A SurveyIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2014.237278541:5(507-525)Online publication date: 1-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2014.2372785
Callaú ONotkin DCheng BPohl K(2013)Supporting incremental programming with ghostsProceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering10.5555/2486788.2487025(1429-1431)Online publication date: 18-May-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2486788.2487025
Samimi HHicks RFogel AMillstein TPezzè MHarman M(2013)Declarative mockingProceedings of the 2013 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/2483760.2483790(246-256)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2483760.2483790
Callau O(2013)Supporting incremental programming with ghosts2013 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)10.1109/ICSE.2013.6606734(1429-1431)Online publication date: May-2013
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2013.6606734

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