Meta-Level Reuse for Mastering Domain Specialization

摘要

We reflect on the distinction between modeling and programming in terms of what and HOW and emphasize the importance of perspectives: what is a model (a what) for the one, may well be a program (a how) for the other. In fact, attempts to pinpoint technical criteria like executability or abstraction for clearly separating modeling from programming seem not to survive modern technical developments. Rather, the underlying conceptual cores continuously converge. What remains is the distinction of WHAT and HOW separating true purpose from its realization, i.e. providing the possibility of formulating the primary intent without being forced to over-specify. We argue that no unified general-purpose language can adequately support this distinction in general, and propose a meta-level framework for mastering the wealth of required domain-specific languages in a bootstrapping fashion.