What You See Is What It Does: A Structural Pattern for Legible Software
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3759429.3762628.pdf
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625.43 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
65b11425af8f38a2276008c3353145ba
Author(s)
Meng, Eagon
Jackson, Daniel
Date Issued
October 9, 2025
Publisher
ACM|Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software
Citation
Eagon Meng and Daniel Jackson. 2025. What You See Is What It Does: A Structural Pattern for Legible Software. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 178–193.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The opportunities offered by LLM coders (and their current limitations) demand a reevaluation of how software is structured. Software today is often “illegible”—lacking a direct correspondence between code and observed behavior—and insufficiently modular, leading to a failure of three key requirements of robust coding: incrementality (the ability to deliver small increments by making localized changes), integrity (avoiding breaking prior increments) and transparency (making clear what has changed at build time, and what actions have happened at runtime).
A new structural pattern offers improved legibility and modularity. Its elements are concepts and synchronizations: fully independent services and event-based rules that mediate between them. A domain-specific language for synchronizations allows behavioral features to be expressed in a granular and declarative way (and thus readily generated by an LLM). A case study of the RealWorld benchmark is used to illustrate and evaluate the approach.
Description
Onward! ’25, Singapore, Singapore
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3759429.3762628
