Towards Generative Programming

Generative Programming (GP) is an attempt to manufacture software components in an automated way by developing programs that synthesize other programs. Our purpose is to introduce the what and the how of the GP approach from a programming language point of view. For the what we discuss the lessons learned from object-oriented languages seen as general purpose languages to develop software factories. For the how we compare a variety of approaches and techniques based on program transformation and generation. On the one hand, we present the evolution of open-ended languages from metalevel programming to aspect-oriented programming. On the other hand, we introduce domain-specific languages as a way to bridge the gap between conceptual models and programming languages.