Who needs languages, and why do they need them? or no matter how high the level, it's still programming

Abstract

Increased research interest in the software development process is threatening to crowd out the concerns of the end user. Computer science provides an abundance of tools, including specification languages, design languages, special-purpose programming languages, and even wide spectrum languages, capable of accommodating the goals of all the preceding languages in a single, unified package. Unfortunately, as computer scientists become more involved with the software development process, the role of the end user tends to diminish. Throwing languages at a problem domain, either in greater numbers or in great flexibility, does not necessarily properly address the needs of the party who wanted the software in the first place. The problem is that, however noble the intentions of language designers may be, the end user will ultimately confront situations in which the major obstacle is one of mastery of the language, rather than difficulties in the problem domain. As an alternative, we propose that more attention be paid to the environmentin which software development takes place than to the languagesin which the stages of development are expressed. This talk will discuss environmental facilities which enhance a user's syntactic and semantic understanding of his software tools.