The Geography of Programming

Tuesday, Oct 24, from 10:30 to 12:00

It has been suggested that far-eastern (predominantly Chinese and Japanese) and western reasoning styles differ greatly: Westerners focus on objects, whereas Easterners focus on fields of interaction. We noted that many software systems that involve dynamically interacting components can be complex to design and implement using a strictly object-oriented approach. We posit that such systems might benefit from a more eastern approach for their design. However, there are currently no eastern-style programming languages of which we are aware. So, we begin our exploration with the work presented in this paper, in which we interview easterners about how they would describe a typical object-oriented scene, and then attempt to capture and distill their descriptions into the guidelines for a programming paradigm.