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

Authors

Victor L. Winter, University of Nebraska at OmahaFollow
James L. Perry, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Harvey Siy, University of Nebraska at OmahaFollow
Satish Srinivasan, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Ben Farkas, Sandia National Laboratories
James McCoy, Sandia National Laboratories

Author ORCID Identifier

Harvey Siy

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2011

Publication Title

Journal of Software Engineering and Applications

Volume

4

First Page

146

Last Page

155

Abstract

Modern high-level programming languages often contain constructs whose semantics are non-trivial. In practice how- ever, 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 o f the analyzability of a language.

Comments

Copyright © 2011 SciRes.

doi:10.4236/jsea.2011.43016

Recommended Citation

Winter, Victor L.; Perry, James L.; Siy, Harvey; Srinivasan, Satish; Farkas, Ben; and McCoy, James, "The Tyranny of the Vital Few: The Pareto Principle in Language Design" (2011). Chemistry Faculty Publications. 57.
https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/chemfacpub/57