I actually ran across this in August (yes, I have a six-week backlog on bookmarked things to post about - mostly I put them back into the stream in the same week I encountered them, but this one is really good and I want to think about it a little more than just posting a "this exists" post.)
Greg Wilson has been bopping around the software world for a long time now, and is concerned about the science of computer programming. As in: there isn't one. He has a fantastic slideshow here, which you can scan through in about three minutes, and it all leads up to his book "The Architecture of Open-Source Applications".
I've just grazed the surface with it, but before I spout off some thoughts, let me inject a couple more links: http://www.neverworkintheory.org/ is a blog about software development research that is relevant in practice (says so on the header), http://software-carpentry.org/ is an organization teaching researchers how to code better, and Wilson's own blog at http://third-bit.com/ - those are the links at the end of the slideshow.
OK. So. Architecture of open-source applications, yeah. This is essentially a list of high-level descriptions of the shape of the code for 49 different serious open-source applications and a little rumination on choices made. This is higher-level than Decl core is looking, but clearly a separate semantics of application architecture would be really nice to have. To that end, I need to read this book, cover to cover.
What I'd like to do is then look at some of these applications at the code level, and build a "semantic framework" describing the code. I'm not even sure what that means yet. But I want to evolve towards code understanding code (for certain values of "understanding").
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