The Tyranny of the Vital Few: The Pareto Principle in Language Design

• 作者: Ben Farkas Harvey Siy James McCoy James Perry Satish Srinivasan Victor Winter
• 来源期刊: 软件工程与应用(英文)
• 学科: 医学
• 关键词: Java Type RESOLUTION Transformation Code Migration SCORE PROCESSOR
• 年，卷（期）: 2011,（3）
• 页码范围: 146-155
• 页数: 10页
• 分类号: R73

摘要

Modern high-level programming languages often contain constructs whose semantics are non-trivial. In practice however, software developers generally restrict the use of such constructs to settings in which their semantics is simple (programmers use language constructs in ways they understand and can reason about). As a result, when developing tools for analyzing and manipulating software, a disproportionate amount of effort ends up being spent developing capabilities needed to analyze constructs in settings that are infrequently used. This paper takes the position that such distinctions between theory and practice are an important measure of the analyzability of a language.