How to Study Programming Systems
Researchers from University of Kent and Charles University succeeded with their paper about programming systems on the <Programming> 2023 conference in Tokio.
<Programming> (International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming) is an innovative conference focused on "everything to do with programming". The annual conference features articles published in an academic journal The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming, which is unique thanks to its "Gold Open Access" policy and its editors include programming language experts from University of Oxford, MIT and others.
Each year, the <Programming> conference committee awards an Editor's Choice Award to the most "emblematic paper for the spirit of the journal". In 2023, the award was given to a paper Technical Dimensions of Programming Systems authored by Joel Jakubovic from University of Kent, Jonathan Edwards and Tomáš Petříček from Department of Distributed and Dependable Systems (D3S).
The paper is motivated by the fact that computer science has a wide range of theoretical tools for the study of "programming languages", but lacks adequate tools for studying "programming systems", which are rich interactive systems that typically complement programming languages and include, among others, spreadsheets or "low-code" and "no-code" end user programming tools. The article presents a methodology for the study of programming systems and aims to provide rigorous foundations for research in this field.
The article is available on the journal website, as well as in an extended interactive form on the author's web page.
