An Introduction to Model Oriented Programming and Development Principles

In a Stack Overflow Blog post, a software developer and builder of Viking ships outlines the principles of model-oriented programming and asks for connections to active academic or industry research. The author, who developed a fully featured model-oriented programming language and IDE thirteen years ago before leaving software engineering six years ago to build Viking and Anglo Saxon ships in Norway, the UK, and Scandinavia, argues that model-oriented programming languages possess great future potential, particularly in the current world of AI.

Defining Models and Structures

According to the author, the core purpose of a model is to concisely represent something else that is larger or more complex. For model-oriented programming, an electronic definition requires that a model be described in terms of structure and data, where the structure defines the rules or schema and is always hierarchical. The author states that a model structure consists of a single root node that can have any number of child nodes, forming a hierarchy of any given depth where nodes are identified by a name and can be described with any number of attributes. Addressing potential skepticism regarding relational databases, the author explains that a relational database schema represents model data rather than model structure, and that database components such as tables, columns, and keys fall into a hierarchy where attributes can refer to other nodes.

Inspirations and Language Features

The principles and features outlined in the article were utilized in enterprise systems over several years. The author notes that while they successfully used this technology on personal and workplace enterprise projects, they failed to sell the ideas to a wider audience. The stated purpose of the article is to inspire research, development, and use of model-oriented languages rather than to focus on the specific technology previously developed. The author explicitly requests that anyone aware of ongoing research and development of model-oriented programming languages at a university or business make contact to discuss potential contributions.