Earlier this year, I finally came across one of the greatest "classic" papers I'd never read: "End-to-End Arguments in System Design" by Saltzer, Reed, and Clark. The end-to-end argument was developed in the realm of internet protocol design. Succinctly put (and this format allows for no alternative) it argues that facilities, such as error checking, which one might be tempted to place at the lower levels of a system or network, might actually be redundant, and therefore useless at the lower levels, when they must be included in the upper levels of the system as well.
We argue that this argument applies as well to programming language design as it does to networking. For instance, facilities that some languages provide for security, protection, synchronization, namespace management, or type checking must often be re-implemented in applications programs in a variety of different ways, many at odds with the manner in which these facilities were provided in these underlying languages. Such duplication raises the question of why these now redundant facilities need be present in these programming languages at all.
This argument suggests a simpler, more dynamic approach to programming language design, based on an end-to-end analysis of the kinds of facilities users really use, may be better suited to the demands of our clustered, networked, threaded multi-core 21st century world.
An OOPSLA 2005 Onward! Breakthrough Ideas Micro-Screed
