archives

Abstraction Tiers of Notations

DZone has published 3 my articles:

Few key points from them:

  • Abstractions are not created equal and they could be sorted by tiers depending on structural elements they use and the way these elements are used.
  • The tiers are closely tied to cognitive development stages as described by J. Piaget and M.L. Commons.
  • Each new tier of the abstractions is built upon constructs of the previous tier.
  • Adoption of new tier causes major generation of the general-purpose programming language to appear.
  • Basing on the model, the next generation of general-purpose programming languages will be likely System-Oriented Programming. That will use ‘system’ as a new category of type that could be instantiated. Current dependency injection frameworks are early and incomplete attempts to implement this new abstraction.
  • Basing on the model, the evolution of the database languages should be parallel to the evolution of general-purpose programming languages, with the same abstraction tiers adopted.

Note, I’ve described some elements of this model in some discussions on LtU previously.