Constraints as a design pattern

Imperative programming has great merits. As the ubiquitous style, it is familiar and its linear, step by step nature is favored by the human mind. Expert programmers, however, are aware of its major flaw: it is easy for meanings to get lost in piles of code, making software hard to understand, extend, and debug. Constraint-based programming as an alternative has been observed to suffer much less from these flaws, where the “what” (the intention) is expressed rather than the “how” (the algorithm) in performing a computation. It is the job of the system to automatically achieve the intention through constraint solving. Sadly, poor performance and expressiveness has prevented this style from seeing widespread adoption. We propose a general programming model as a kind of a sweet spot between imperative and constraint-based programming. Our aim is to leverage many benefits of constraint-based programming such as understandability, behavioral modularity, extensibility, etc., in a...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: OOPSLA
• Authors: Hesam Samimi, Alessandro Warth, Mahdi Eslamimehr, Alan Borning
• Keywords: OOPSLA 2015, Security Privacy