Visions of future programming environments

As the demand for greater system functionality is being met with software, the productivity of software development has been receiving increasing attention. The trend has been to provide software developers with automated tools to assist in many of the methodical tasks. More recently there has been a recognition that a development environment is more than simply a collection of tools. Several projects have investigated the issues involved in building software development environments. The use of very large scale integration techniques have likewise introduced the need for hardware developer to manage increasing levels of complexity. The VLSI and VHSIC communities have built a large number of tools to support their design activites. These communities are engaged in evolving those tools into integrated design environments.