Expressions of Change

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    Project Motivation

    In the articles linked below we explore the motivation for this project.

    In short: [a] Computer programs will be changed and [b] existing tools are insufficiently capable to support this. In the below we explore both these ideas in more detail.

     

  1. Build once, maintain forever

    The state of the art of running a small website is to build once, manually maintain forever. This burden of maintenance is largely caused by changes in other software, as opposed to changes in our own requirements.

  2. Self applicability

    Self applicability is one of the most powerful ideas in computer science. In this article we’ll see how this idea can be applied to Expressions of Change such as Version Control, and how this compares to existing solutions such as Git.

  3. The power of Undo

    The undo command is probably one of the most powerful commands in any document editor. It is hard to imagine an editor without undo to be taken seriously, let alone gain any popularity - be it an editor of text, images, movies or any other kind of document.

  4. Existing tools

    Because dealing with change of the software itself is such a central part of the challenge of software development, a myriad of tools to manage these changes has sprung up. Examples are version control systems, build systems, provisioning tools and package management.

  5. Lehman's SPE-classfication

    In the 1980 article “Programs, Life Cycles, and Laws of Software Evolution” by Meir Lehman, a classification of computer programs into 3 types (S, P & E) is put forth. This classification forms a useful background against which to understand software evolution.