Chitchyan, Ruzanna and Cazzola, Walter and Rashid, Awais (2015) Engineering sustainability through language. In: Software Engineering (ICSE), 2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on :. IEEE, pp. 501-504. ISBN 9781479919345
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Abstract
As our understanding and care for sustainability concerns increases, so does the demand for incorporating these concerns into software. Yet, existing programming language constructs are not well-aligned with concepts of the sustainability domain. This undermines what we term technical sustainability of the software due to (i) increased complexity in programming of such concerns and (ii) continuous code changes to keep up with changes in (environmental, social, legal and other) sustainability-related requirements. In this paper we present a proof-of-concept approach on how technical sustainability support for new and existing concerns can be provided through flexible language-level programming. We propose to incorporate sustainability-related behaviour into programs through micro-languages enabling such behaviour to be updated and/or redefined as and when required.