Functional requirements

The principal design goal when it comes to the choice of programming environment has been: a maximum of functionality with a minimum of effort. Here, functionality means different things:

• Availability of useful libraries and functionality.

• Portability to different platforms.

• Availability for ordinary users.

• Possibility of implementing content activation for a maximum of content formats.

but not primarily performance, notably, which will be a later problem[1]. Low effort means:

• Prototypability, i.e., the ability to quickly try out ideas. This demands a low level of implementation overhead and nonfundamental details, and enables us to focuse the design on the structure rather that on the implementation.

• Extensibility and flexibility, to be able to maintain a certain structure in the code in spite of large rewrites.

One must, however, have in mind that the choice of environment must not influence the design in a way that would cause troubles that day when we decide to change the environment.