Software Language Engineering

Mechanizing the development of hard-to-write and costly-to-maintain software is the core problem of automated software design. Encoding expert knowledge (a.k.a. dark knowledge) about a software domain is central to its solution. We assert that a solution can be cast in terms of the ideas of language design and engineering. Graph grammars can be a foundation for modern automated software development. The sentences of a grammar are designs of complex dataflow systems. We explain how graph grammars provide a framework to encode expert knowledge, produce correct-by-construction derivations of dataflow applications, enable the generation of high-performance code, and improve how software design of dataflow applications can be taught to undergraduates.

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