The Stripetalk Papers: Understandability as a Language Design Issue in
Object-Oriented Programming Systems
Authors: T.R.G. Green, A. Borning, T. O'Shea, M. Minoughan, and R. Smith
In Prototype Based Programming, James Noble, Antero Taivalsaari, and
Ivan Moore (eds.), Springer-Verlag, 1998.
Abstract
Language features that influence the learnability and understandability of
Smalltalk (O'Shea 1986) have motivated us to explore alternative
language designs. We present a language space whose dimensions correspond
to the ways of dealing with these identified learnability-influencing
features. For example, one dimension represents how new objects are
created in a language; we consider prototype-based copying and class-based
instantiation. We establish the positions of some existing languages in
this space and locate several new ones. Some of these languages may hold
promise for improved learnability and understandability, and we propose a
mechanism for testing them with comparison studies. An important
observation from the current explorations has been that it is necessary to
consider language features in the context of the tools provided by the
environment; the effectiveness of a particular linguistic feature is
enhanced or diminished by the degree of environmental support provided for it.
full paper: pdf
Constraints home page