Ercatons and Organic Programming: Say Good-Bye to Planned Economy

Abstract

Organic programming (OP) is our proposed and already emerging programming model which overcomes some of the limitations of current practice in software development in general and of object-oriented programming (OOP) in particular. Ercatons provide an implementation of the model. In some respects, OP is less than a (new) programming language, in others, it is more. An "ercato machine" implements the ideas discussed and has been used to validate the concepts described here.

Organic programming is centered around the concept of a true "Thing". A thing in an executing software system is bound to behave the way an autonomous object does in our real world, or like a cell does in an organism. Software objects do not. Therefore, traditional software systems must be planned while with OP, software systems grow. This fact is traced back to be the root why current software development often fails to meet our expectations when it comes to large-scale projects. OP should then be able to provide the means to make software development achieve what other engineering disciplines have achieved a long time ago: that project effort scales sub-linearly with size.

With OP we introduce a new term because we hope that the approach we are pursuing is radical enough to justify this.