Extreme terseness: some languages are more agile than others

Authors:
Stephen Taylor
Affiliations:
Lambent Technology, London
Venue:
XP'03 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Extreme programming and agile processes in software engineering
Year:
2003

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Abstract

While XP principles are independent of the languages in which software is developed, we can distinguish properties of programming languages that affect the agility of development. Some languages are inherently more agile than others, and the experience of developing software in these languages reflects this. A family of languages descended from the mathematics notation developed at Harvard in the 1950s by Iverson [1] shares properties of extreme terseness and abstractive power with weak data typing. The history of software development in these languages foreshadows some of the characteristics of XP projects. To these linguistic communities, XP offers the prospect of rehabilitating styles of software development that fell into disrepute with the rise of software engineering. Conversely, these languages offer XP practitioners the possibility of radical condensation of the conversation between developer and customer.