PLNews: Programming Language News

An interview with Victoria Livschitz, of Sun Microsystems, discussing her envisioned Metaphors programming language is now available.

Metaphors aims to help alleviate the difficulties associated with developing complex software systems using existing languages. She suggests a system of "distributed runtime cores", and "local virtual machines" which act as containers for managed application code. She also proposes "core system-level constructs built into the language, designed to make the task of the formal codification of systems a far more intuitive process, as compared to programming in object-oriented languages." Reuse mechanisms, such as composition, derivation, and adaptation, should also be directly supported by the language.

She states, "If programmers naturally think in terms of metaphors and recursively build higher-level metaphors from lower-level ones, then that should be the model for the software creation process supported by the programming language. Eventually, I hope to facilitate a style of software development in which one can say, in a programming statement, "The contextual model of this application is just like a contextual model of that application, except..." and then define exactly how the two are different."