Regularized Programming with the Bosque Language

The rise of Structured Programming and Abstract Data Types in the 1970’s represented a major shift in programming languages. These methodologies represented a move away from a programming model that reflected incidental features of the underlying hardware architecture and toward a model that emphasized programmer intent more directly. This shift simultaneously made it easier and less error prone for a developer to convert their mental model of a system into code and led to a golden age of compiler and IDE tooling development. This paper takes another step on this path by further lifting the model for iterative processing away from low-level loop actions, enriching the language with algebraic data transformation operators, and further simplifying the problem of reasoning about program behavior by removing incidental ties to a particular computational substrate and indeterminate behaviors. We believe that, just as structured programming did years ago, this regularized programming model will lead to massively improved developer productivity, increased software quality, and enable a second golden age of developments in compilers and developer tooling.