On liberating programs from the von neumann architecture via event-based modularization

Abstract

From the early days of computers, researchers have been trying to invent effective and efficient means for expressing software systems through the introduction of new programming languages. In the early days, due to the limitations of the technology, the abstractions of the programming languages were conceptually close to the abstractions of the von Neumann based realization platforms. With the advancement of the technology, computers have been increasingly applied for complex problems in different application domains. This required the challenge of designing programming languages that resemble more the semantics of software rather than the concepts of underlying machinery. To this aim, various new language concepts, such as object-oriented, aspect-oriented, and event-based languages have been introduced. While these languages were successful in enhancing the expression power of languages towards more semantic concerns of application domains, they fail in short in representing emergent behavioral patterns of software effectively. We outline a set of requirements to overcome these shortcomings, and explain the concept of event-based modularization as a possible solution.