Dancing with Symmetry to Harness the Power of Complexity: Subjective Programming in Context

At any instant when you are programming, some details rise to the foreground and others recede into the background context. The manner in which the programming language supports context profoundly affects the ease of evolution and reuse. We propose a language paradigm that amplifies the power of object-oriented programming by explicitly supporting multi-dimensional context, and using it for dispatch and for program organization. It can directly express, in a unified and simple fashion, many situations that are awkward with object-oriented programming or that usually require ad hoc mechanisms. Although it adds complexity to the object-oriented model, an environment can employ subjectivity with progressive disclosure to hide dimensions and present developer-specific views, thereby smoothing the learning curve. In this talk we will introduce and illustrate the paradigm, give some details of context-based dispatch, and show a glimpse of our early prototype.

Speakers: David Ungar and Harold Ossher, IBM Research