Raising the level of abstraction: what if we tried to do that bottom up?

Federico TomassettiMarch 9th, 2016Last Updated: March 9th, 2016

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It is clear that software development is going in the direction of raising the level of abstraction since it was born.

The reason is simple: we can juggle with so many concepts in our mind. If we are busy thinking about what we stored in the EAX register it is difficult to think about the bigger picture. As we raise the level of abstraction we start using bigger bricks and we can see farther. Once we think in terms of objects the OOP design patterns can emerge, because they build on combinations of a few concepts at our current level of abstraction.

How are we moving to higher levels of abstractions? By hiding the details. We hide how we use registers, how we allocate memory, how pointers are handled, how polymorphism is implemented.

There are several way we can achieve that: normally we build new languages from which we generate or compile to some lower level abstraction. For example many C++ compilers at the beginning were just spitting out some C. Also compilers for Eiffel were using the same strategy. One thing that instead was not tried was to evolve languages adding new concepts as they emerge. In this case I am thinking about a gradual process which would target micro-patterns. Things like getters or setters in Java. Or things like this one:

if code not in self.data:
    self.data = {}
return self.data

What we are doing here? we are just returning self.data. If it was not initialized we would set it to a default value ({}). Ok, lazy initialization: this is a concept common and comprehensible per se. What if we could add this concept and see if it is then used to build up new patterns?

This would be trivial to do using a tool like Jetbrains MPS.

I plan to play a little bit with this idea in next week and see where it leads me.