Where did this whole “Draco Approach” with domain analysis, domain languages, optimizations and refinements come from?
The best rationalization of the approach is presented in The Evolution from Software Components to Domain Analysis. How do you do domain analysis? Sigmund Sundfor, a domain expert, visited our research group and did an analysis and discussed the results using the style of analysis we still prefer. Won’t systems refined using these high-level, general domains be terribly inefficient? On the contrary we find the resulting systems to be at least as efficient as hand-built systems. Optimizers can only optimize concepts they understand. In Program Manipulation via an Efficient Production System we studied compiler-like optimizations using source-to-source program transformations. Far too many low-level transformations were required to achieve goals that at a domain with a higher level of abstraction were easy to achieve with very few transformations. Transforming Experiences provides a simple illustration of this effect. Further, Software Construction using Components shows that variation i
