Inspired software design early jackson methods to thread architectures

Abstract

This is a somewhat personal account of a journey starting with assembly coding based on Jackson Structured Programming (JSP) and ending with the design of thread architectures for reactive software systems using entity-life modeling (ELM) . As the level of abstraction rises, the basic concepts remain the same: The software takes its shape from structures in the problem domain. JSP bases control structures on regular expressions describing data streams. Jackson System Development (JSD) introduces long-running processes patterned on the life histories of entities in the problem domain. Unfortunately, implementing long-running processes in sequential programs leads to awkward solutions. ELM lets us im-plement the processes as threads. This is a natural fit, which re-moves the awkwardness.