Design Choices of Document-Oriented Programming Systems

Tomas Petricek, Jonathan Edwards, Joel Jakubovic

Unpublished Draft.

Many interesting programming systems treat programming as document manipulation. Examples include spreadsheets, data science notebooks, educational environments like Boxer and multiple recent research programming systems. In such systems, the programmer interacts with a document containing a structured representation of both code and data. They modify the code and data, trigger computations and view the results from the unified document interface. Those document-oriented programming systems have a specific set of design choices. The concepts that we need to understand them and design them differ from the well-understood design choices known from programming languages and other programming systems.

The aim of this paper is to identify the key design choices that characterise different document-oriented programming systems. We review both historical and recent examples of such systems and identify twelve design choices that cover four aspects of the system design: (i) what structure and representation of document they use, (ii) how is programming embedded within the systems, (iii) how the user interface displays documents and allows for their editing, and (iv) how are computations within the system evaluated.

The catalogue refines our earlier work on technical dimensions of programming systems. It is rooted in our need to understand the design choices and their consequences when designing multiple different document-oriented programming systems over the last multiple years. The catalogue provides a high-level map of the design space of document-oriented programming systems, makes it possible to identify differences and similarities across different systems and also suggests under-explored design choices and combinations of choices as areas for future research.

The key contribution of this work is perhaps not the catalogue of design choices itself, but the fact that we identify a new programming paradigm. Document-oriented programming systems have rich historical roots, widely-adopted contemporary examples, but they are also an active research area. We hope the review presented in this paper will aid future development of this new paradigm.

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If you have any comments, suggestions or related ideas, I'll be happy to hear from you! Send me an email at tomas@tomasp.net or get in touch via BlueSky at @tomasp.net.