Domain-specific Programming Research Articles

Design and use of domain-specific programming platforms: interdisciplinary computational thinking with EarSketch and TunePad

ABSTRACT Background and Context The Domain-Specific Programming (DSP) platforms EarSketch and TunePad are being used widely in schools for coding novices. Existing studies on both platforms have mainly concentrated on attitudinal changes, leaving a gap in the literature. Objective The purpose of this research was to advance our understanding of two contrasting DSP platform designs that aim to achieve the same Computational Thinking (CT) learning goals. Method Two mixed-method case studies were conducted in an authentic school setting to evaluate the design and use of EarSketch and TunePad. Findings The results suggest both platforms enabled CT that contributed to interdisciplinary learning outcomes, but educators and DSP platform designers should be mindful of their respective strengths, weaknesses, and limitations. Implications Each platform may suit diverse educational goals, considering individual student backgrounds and interests. Additionally, when designing DSP platforms with interactive graphical features, trade-offs for enabling CT should be considered.

DreamCoder: growing generalizable, interpretable knowledge with wake-sleep Bayesian program learning.

Expert problem-solving is driven by powerful languages for thinking about problems and their solutions. Acquiring expertise means learning these languages-systems of concepts, alongside the skills to use them. We present DreamCoder, a system that learns to solve problems by writing programs. It builds expertise by creating domain-specific programming languages for expressing domain concepts, together with neural networks to guide the search for programs within these languages. A 'wake-sleep' learning algorithm alternately extends the language with new symbolic abstractions and trains the neural network on imagined and replayed problems. DreamCoder solves both classic inductive programming tasks and creative tasks such as drawing pictures and building scenes. It rediscovers the basics of modern functional programming, vector algebra and classical physics, including Newton's and Coulomb's laws. Concepts are built compositionally from those learned earlier, yielding multilayered symbolic representations that are interpretable and transferrable to new tasks, while still growing scalably and flexibly with experience. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Cognitive artificial intelligence'.

Semantics Foundation for Cyber-physical Systems Using Higher-order UTP

Model-based design has become the predominant approach to the design of hybrid and cyber-physical systems (CPSs). It advocates the use of mathematically founded models to capture heterogeneous digital and analog behaviours from domain-specific formalisms, allowing all engineering tasks of verification, code synthesis, and validation to be performed within a single semantic body. Guaranteeing the consistency among the different views and heterogeneous models of a system at different levels of abstraction, however, poses significant challenges. To address these issues, Hoare and He’s Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP) proposes a calculus to capture domain-specific programming and modelling paradigms into a unified semantic framework. Our goal is to extend UTP to form a semantic foundation for CPS design. Higher-order UTP (HUTP) is a conservative extension to Hoare and He’s theory that supports the specification of discrete, real-time, and continuous dynamics, concurrency and communication, and higher-order quantification. Within HUTP, we define a calculus of normal hybrid designs to model, analyse, compose, refine, and verify heterogeneous hybrid system models. In addition, we define respective formal semantics for Hybrid Communicating Sequential Processes and Simulink using HUTP.

Using Markup Languages for Accessible Scientific, Technical, and Scholarly Document Creation

In using software to write a scientific, technical, or other scholarly document, authors have essentially two options. They can either write it in a ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) editor such as a word processor, or write it in a text editor using a markup language such as HTML, LaTeX, Markdown, or AsciiDoc. This paper gives an overview of the latter approach, focusing on both the non-visual accessibility of the writing process, and that of the documents produced. Currently popular markup languages and established tools associated with them are introduced. Support for mathematical notation is considered. In addition, domain-specific programming languages for constructing various types of diagrams can be well integrated into the document production process. These languages offer interesting potential to facilitate the non-visual creation of graphical content, while raising insufficiently explored research questions. The flexibility with which documents written in current markup languages can be converted to different output formats is emphasized. These formats include HTML, EPUB, and PDF, as well as file formats used by contemporary word processors. Such conversion facilities can serve as means of enhancing the accessibility of a document both for the author (during the editing and proofreading process) and for those among the document’s recipients who use assistive technologies, such as screen readers and screen magnifiers. Current developments associated with markup languages and the accessibility of scientific or technical documents are described. The paper concludes with general commentary, together with a summary of opportunities for further research and software development.

Can guided decomposition help end-users write larger block-based programs? a mobile robot experiment

Block-based programming environments, already popular in computer science education, have been successfully used to make programming accessible to end-users in domains like robotics, mobile apps, and even DevOps. Most studies of these applications have examined small programs that fit within a single screen, yet real-world programs often grow large, and editing these large block-based programs quickly becomes unwieldy. Traditional programming language features, like functions, allow programmers to decompose their programs. Unfortunately, both previous work, and our own findings, suggest that end-users rarely use these features, resulting in large monolithic code blocks that are hard to understand. In this work, we introduce a block-based system that provides users with a hierarchical, domain-specific program structure and requires them to decompose their programs accordingly. Through a user study with 92 users, we compared this approach, which we call guided program decomposition, to a traditional system that supports functions, but does not require decomposition. We found that while almost all users could successfully complete smaller tasks, those who decomposed their programs were significantly more successful as the tasks grew larger. As expected, most users without guided decomposition did not decompose their programs, resulting in poor performance on larger problems. In comparison, users of guided decomposition performed significantly better on the same tasks. Though this study investigated only a limited selection of tasks in one specific domain, it suggests that guided decomposition can benefit end-user programmers. While no single decomposition strategy fits all domains, we believe that similar domain-specific sub-hierarchies could be found for other application areas, increasing the scale of code end-users can create and understand.

Адаптивный подход к реализации сложных систем моделирования

The paper presents an approach potentially capable of implementing efficient import substitution in the field of modern software systems for simulating and designing manufacturing processes in various industries, as well as of compensating for the destruction of international connections that made it possible to build efficient labor division structures for developing modern software systems. To solve these problems, we propose to implement an adaptive simulation system than can adjust to different domains by means of considerable automation concerning development of domain-specific programming languages describing models in the relevant subject areas. We also propose to split development into the following competence and responsibility zones: developing an extensible core for the adaptive simulation system and shared language and visual (graphic) components; developing domain-specific extensions, which may include both language and visual (graphic) components; populating a specific extension with a database of industry standards; developing a manufacturing model specifically. Using a shared platform represented by the adaptive simulation system allows for reusing extensions from different domains so as to form complex simulations, resulting in possible technological breakthroughs at the juxtaposition of various industries. The paper also briefly describes certain risks associated with the implementation and maintenance of complex simulation systems in the Russian Federation. We consider alternatives to the solutions proposed

Programming music with Sonic Pi promotes positive attitudes for beginners

Programming is often misaligned with beginner students' interests and viewed as difficult. However, most students and teachers are not aware that it is possible to utilise domain-specific programming languages that combine programming with other domains like music making. Sonic Pi is one free domain-specific programming platform that enables beginners to code music, which has been designed for and used in schools since its first release in 2012. However, there is a lack of academic research on the Sonic Pi platform about the extent it may affect beginner student attitudes towards programming in a school context. The aim of this study was to investigate the extent Sonic Pi may help to promote positive attitudes towards programming. A mixed-methods case study was developed and trialled in school time with a middle school class, which measured student attitudes with the three subscales of enjoyment, importance, and anxiety. Overall, the results confirmed an alternative hypothesis that all students’ subscales for programming attitude increased significantly. While these findings are not generalisable due to its limited scope, they are very positive to inform the design and use of platforms like Sonic Pi in comparison to similar music coding platforms like EarSketch and TunePad.

Vis-a-Vis: Visual Exploration of Visualization Source Code Evolution.

Developing an algorithm for a visualization prototype often involves the direct comparison of different development stages and design decisions, and even minor modifications may dramatically affect the results. While existing development tools provide visualizations for gaining general insight into performance and structural aspects of the source code, they neglect the central importance of result images unique to graphical algorithms. In this article, we present a novel approach that enables visualization programmers to simultaneously explore the evolution of their algorithm during the development phase together with its corresponding visual outcomes by providing an automatically updating meta visualization. Our interactive system allows for the direct comparison of all development states on both the visual and the source code level, by providing easy to use navigation and comparison tools. The on-the-fly construction of difference images, source code differences, and a visual representation of the source code structure further enhance the user's insight into the states' interconnected changes over time. Our solution is accessible via a web-based interface that provides GPU-accelerated live execution of C++ and GLSL code, as well as supporting a domain-specific programming language for scientific visualization.

JCOGIN: a programming framework for particle transport on combinatorial geometry

Domain-specific programming frameworks are usually effective to simplify the development of large-scale applications on supercomputers. This paper introduces a parallel programming framework named JCOGIN for particle transport on combinatorial geometry. JCOGIN provides a combinatorial geometry data model and a patch-based parallel computing model to manage the data distribution in parallel computing and implements the hybrid parallelism of the domain decomposition and the particle parallelism on MPI/OpenMP to overcome the bottleneck of huge memory demand and long computational time. The application programming interface of JCOGIN can support users to quickly develop their parallel particle transport applications. Based on this framework, users only need to write serial codes for large-scale numerical simulations on modern supercomputers. The parallel efficiency of applications based on JCOGIN can reach up to 80% on hundreds of thousands of CPU cores.

The Influence of Occupational Categories on Overall and Domain-Specific Physical Activity and the Association with Chronic Diseases. An Analysis Using the Austrian Health Interview Survey.

Background: The performance of physical activity (PA) in different domains varies between different occupational groups and they contribute differently to the prevention and management of chronic diseases. This study aimed to give a fuller picture of the potential influence occupational categories have on the different domains of PA among the Austrian population of working age. Methods: A total of 8251 gainfully employed persons in 9 major and 39 sub-major occupational groups from the Austrian Health Interview Survey 2014 were analyzed. PA was measured with the Physical Activity Questionnaire of the European Health Interview Survey (EHIS-PAQ) and the prevalence of 17 chronic diseases was obtained. Results: A total of 48.2% were mostly active when working, 18.4% reported transport-related PA in the upper quintile, 50.4% performed at least 150 min per week of moderate PA or cycling, 32.7% performed muscle-strengthening PA at least twice a week, and 76.3% were either mostly physically active when working or complied with the aerobic PA guidelines. As a general rule, people in physically active occupational groups tended to perform less PA in their leisure time and vice versa. Occupational groups with especially low amount of PA were Information Technology workers, directors, and secretarial staff. People with a chronic disease tended to perform less PA, but there was an interaction between occupation and chronic disease on PA. Conclusions: Domain-specific programs to promote PA should be developed for various occupational categories.

Macros for domain-specific languages

Macros provide a powerful means of extending languages. They have proven useful in both general-purpose and domain-specific programming contexts. This paper presents an architecture for implementing macro-extensible DSLs on top of macro-extensible host languages. The macro expanders of these DSLs inherit the syntax system, hygienic expansion, and more from the host. They transform the extensible DSL syntax into a DSL core language. This arrangement has several important consequences. It becomes straightforward to integrate the syntax of various DSLs and the host language when their expanders share these inherited components. Also, a DSL compiler may be designed around a fixed core language, even for an extensible DSL. Finally, macros empower programmers to safely grow DSLs on their own and tailor them to their needs.

Domain-Specific Programming Languages for Computational Nucleic Acid Systems.

The construction of models of system behavior is of great importance throughout science and engineering. In bioengineering and bionanotechnology, these often take the form of dynamic models that specify the evolution of different species over time. To ensure that scientific observations and conclusions are consistent and that systems can be reliably engineered on the basis of model predictions, it is important that models of biomolecular systems can be constructed in a reliable, principled, and efficient manner. This review focuses on efforts to address this need by using domain-specific programming languages as the basis for custom design tools for researchers working on computational nucleic acid devices, where a domain-specific language is simply a programming language tailored to a particular application domain. The underlying thesis of our review is that there is a continuum of practical implementation strategies for computational nucleic acid systems, which can all benefit from appropriate domain-specific languages and software design tools. We emphasize the need for specialized yet flexible tools that can be realized using domain-specific languages that compile to more general-purpose representations.

Semantics and pragmatics of programming language ASAMPL

This paper presents semantics and practical implementation of the domain-specific programming language ASAMPL. This programming language has been developed to support the efficient processing of multimodal data processing, in particular, the processing of multimedia content which components are evidently defined in terms of time. The data processing concept employed in ASAMPL is based on the data structures, operations, and relations defined in the algebraic system of aggregates. The paper explains the compilation approach used for this programming language as well as it presents the test results and their discussion. Problems in programming 2020; 1: 74-83

Development of the Open Digital Platform for Conducting the Large-Scale Psychological Research

The paper presents result of the development of the open digital platform (DigitalPsyTools.ru), which provides support for conducting the large-scale psychological research. Development of the dedicated information and data analysis instrument has a goal to consolidate the efforts of the professional interdisciplinary specialists in the area of psychological research on a single platform. Digital psychological platform is built as an evolving information environment with the toolset for conducting psychological studies of all levels. The paper describes the key functional capabilities, tasks solved and requirements implied for the software implementation and target environment conditions. The scalability, variability of the target execution environments of the software components and local specifics provide the foundation for crystallization of the platform development principles. Internal standard of the psychological test representation in a semi-structured form, corresponding domain-specific programming language and its interpreter software were developed. These components provide means for automatic questionnaire web-interface generation for the study participants. The results of the web-interface testing using varying devices are presented.

FlowSpec: A declarative specification language for intra-procedural flow-Sensitive data-flow analysis

Abstract Data-flow analysis is the static analysis of programs to estimate their approximate run-time behavior or approximate intermediate run-time values. It is an integral part of modern language specifications and compilers. In the specification of static semantics of programming languages, the concept of data-flow allows the description of well-formedness such as definite assignment of a local variable before its first use. In the implementation of compiler back-ends, data-flow analyses inform optimizations. Data-flow analysis has an established theoretical foundation. What lags behind is implementations of data-flow analysis in compilers, which are usually ad-hoc. This makes such implementations difficult to extend and maintain. In previous work researchers have proposed higher-level formalisms suitable for whole-program analysis in a separate tool, incremental analysis within editors, or bound to a specific intermediate representation. In this paper, we present FlowSpec , an executable formalism for specification of data-flow analysis. FlowSpec is a domain-specific language that enables direct and concise specification of data-flow analysis for programming languages, designed to express flow-sensitive, intra-procedural analyses. We define the formal semantics of FlowSpec in terms of monotone frameworks. We describe the design of FlowSpec using examples of standard analyses. We also include a description of our implementation of FlowSpec . In a case study we evaluate FlowSpec with the static analyses for Green-Marl , a domain-specific programming language for graph analytics.

Trinity

In this demo paper, we introduce Trinity, a general-purpose framework that can be used to quickly build domain-specific program synthesizers for automating many tedious tasks that arise in data science. We illustrate how Trinity can be used by three different users: First, we show how end-users can use Trinity's built-in synthesizers to automate data wrangling tasks. Second, we show how advanced users can easily extend existing synthesizers to support additional functionalities. Third, we show how synthesis experts can change the underlying search engine in Trinity. Overall, this paper is intended to demonstrate how users can quickly use, modify, and extend the Trinity framework with the goal of automating many tasks that are considered to be the "janitor" work of data science.

The Effectiveness of a Systems Engineering Course in Developing Systems Thinking

Contribution: An evaluation of the effectiveness of systems engineering (SE) courses in developing students’ systems thinking (ST) capacity in both the cognitive and affective domains. A combined cognitive ST performance and affective engagement with ST assessment is proposed as an approach to assess students’ ST in both domains. The results can support course change decisions and guide learning experience development. Background: SE education aims to produce graduates with strong knowledge and skills in SE and a strong appreciation of the practical value of ST, which addresses the cognitive and affective domains in education. Consequently, it is important to evaluate the effectiveness of SE courses in developing students’ ST in these domains, an area that studies do not consider. Intended Outcomes: An understanding of the ST ability of undergraduate students in an SE course in a domain specific engineering program in both the cognitive and affective domains. Application Design: A study evaluated the effectiveness of two SE classes in developing students’ ST capacity using a combined cognitive and affective assessment tool developed and validated in previous studies. ST assessment is determined by combining ST performance and affective engagement. To observe the transformation of students’ ST capacity, a longitudinal design collected data at two times in each of two offerings of an SE course offered by the same university in two locations—Australia and Singapore. Findings: The course developed students in most dimensions of cognitive ST, but did not appear to improve students’ affective engagement with ST.

JAUMIN: a programming framework for large-scale numerical simulation on unstructured meshes

Domain-specific programming frameworks are usually effective to simplify the development of large-scale applications on supercomputers. This paper introduces a programming framework named JAUMIN for large-scale numerical applications on unstructured meshes. Based on this framework, serial codes are only required to be written for large-scale parallel application suitable for modern supercomputers with tens of thousands of CPU cores.

Accelerating API-Based Program Synthesis via API Usage Pattern Mining

Program Synthesis is an exciting topic in software engineering which aims to generate programs satisfying user intent automatically. Although different approaches have been proposed in program synthesis, only small or domain-specific programs can be generated in practice, the main obstacle of which lies in the intractability of program space. With the rapid growth of reusable libraries, component-based synthesis provides a promising way, such as synthesizing Java programs that are only composed of APIs. However, the efficiency of searching for proper solutions for complex tasks is still a challenge. In certain scenarios, some API methods are frequently called together. The usage of these API methods always follows some usage patterns. Incorporating the information about API usage patterns will help to accelerate the speed of program synthesis. However, state-of-the-art synthesis tools do not capture the inherent relationships between API methods. Aiming at this problem, we propose a novel approach to accelerate the speed of API-based program synthesis via API usage pattern mining. It is a general approach that can be applied to any approach of API-based synthesis. We first collect open source projects of high quality from the Internet and use an off-the-shelf API-usage-pattern-mining tool to mine API usage patterns from these code snippets. We use two strategies to incorporate the information about API usage patterns with program synthesis, and either strategy can improve the efficiency of program synthesis. We evaluate our approach on 20 real programming tasks, which shows that our approach can accelerate the speed of program synthesis by 86% compared to the baseline.

Automating the Development of High-Performance Multigrid Solvers

The purpose of a domain-specific language (DSL) is to enable the application programmer to specify a problem, or an abstract algorithm description, in his/her domain of expertise without being burdened by implementation details. The ideal scenario is that the implementation detail is added in an automatic process of program translation and code generation. The approach of domain-specific program generation has lately received increasing attention in the area of computational science and engineering. In this paper, we introduce the new code generation framework Athariac. Its goal is to support the quick implementation of a language processing and program optimization platform for a given DSL based on stepwise term rewriting. We demonstrate the framework’s use on our DSL ExaSlang for the specification and optimization of multigrid solvers. On this example, we provide evidence of Athariac’s potential for making domain-specific software engineering more productive.