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Software is a communication system. The usual topic of communication isprogram behavior, as encoded by programs. Domain-specific libraries arecodebooks, domain-specific languages are coding schemes, and so forth. To turnmetaphor into method, we adapt toolsfrom information theory--the study ofefficient communication--to probe the efficiency with which languages andlibraries let us communicate programs. In previous work we developed aninformation-theoretic analysis of software reuse in problem domains. This newpaper uses information theory to analyze tradeoffs in the design of components,generators, and metalanguages. We seek answers to two questions: (1) How can wejudge whether a component is over- or under-generalized? Drawing on minimumdescription length principles, we propose that the best component yields themost succinct representation of the use cases. (2) If we view a programminglanguage as an assemblage of metalanguages, each providing a complementarystyle of abstraction, how can these metalanguages aid or hinder us inefficiently describing software? We describe a complex triangle of interactionsbetween the power of an abstraction mechanism, the amount of reuse it enables,and the cognitive difficulty of its use.

Parsimony Principles for Software Components and Metalanguages