Abstract

When using external code, we rely on complex interactions within a programming environment. This seminar talk will cover challenges that arise in conventional programming environments, in particular name conflicts, context dependence, impedance mismatch of code-related metainformation, and implications of coarse-grained code distribution. After that, the talk will introduce the concept of a “search-focused programming environment” which overcomes the mentioned issues. The talk will describe the key components in this setting: content-addressable code identifiers, precise dependency tracking, and uniform code and metadata storage and access. Finally, the talk will discuss how we can adapt existing programming languages to this setting based on implementation efforts so far.