Tuesday, November 4, 2008

A Brazen Position

Evan's thesis is, essentially, that analyses should be more user friendly.

He means that developers should be able to more naturally interact with the analyses driving whatever language tasks they are performing. Raluca and I just submitted a paper with a slightly different spin on this:

An analysis should match the abstraction level of the consumer. In most cases, this is actually fairly high level. In our particular case -- control-flow analysis of end-user applications (aka web applications) -- we argue for control flow in terms of the language of the user interface. For example, a submit button on one form in which a chat menu is open goes to another page where the chat menu is still open. A state is simply the actions a user may take.

Sounds really deep, complicated, and hard to use, right?

No comments: