Programming as an engineering discipline

Abstract

For too long computer programming has been treated as an art or a craft rather than as a science or an engineering discipline. The Kernel Language approach provides a precise and concise basis for programming in all paradigms (imperative, logical, functional and object-oriented) as well as for parallel, concurrent and distributed multi-thread programming. The Kernel Language is implemented as a subset of Oz, a powerful, multi-paradigm programming language that is similar to Java. This allows us to apply the theory to enhance the art of practical problem solving. KL allows us to introduce multi-thread programming and the major programming paradigms in first courses of programming. With the rapidly expanding acceptance of multi-language programming capabilities of dotNET, a revision of traditional introductory programming courses becomes more and more important.