RELATIONSHIP ORIENTED SOFTWARE
Reorso.
We think software should be built around how things relate to each other.
The idea
Programming languages have circled one question for decades.
What is this thing?
ASSEMBLY
Mostly shrugged. You moved bytes around and kept the meaning in your head.
C
Answered with shape. A struct says what a thing contains.
JAVA
Answered with category. An object gets a class when it is made, and keeps it for life.
Each step made bigger programs possible. None of them made programs easy to change.
We think the question was too small.
A thing is not only what it contains. It is not the label it was handed when it was made.
It is how it is connected.
Relationship Oriented Software starts there. Model the relationships first, and what something is stops being fixed up front. It becomes something you can ask.
The claim is practical. Software built this way is easier to understand,
easier to reason about, and cheaper to maintain.
The claim is practical. Software built
this way is easier to understand,
easier to reason about, and
cheaper to maintain.
The idea is Jasbir's. Empathy is where we are testing it.
Empathy
Empathy is a programming language built on that idea. It is the experiment, with its sleeves rolled up.
If relationships are the right foundation, the language should show it. Not in a slogan. Not in a speech. In the ordinary work of changing a program.
Work started in 2011. The first two years were research — no code yet, just the long quiet thinking part.
Fifteen years and more than eight thousand commits later, there is a working compiler, an editor that runs inside Eclipse, and a standard library. Programs run today.
The findings so far are good.
Empathy is not finished, and it is not available yet.
Two runtimes
Empathy will ship with a runtime built for modelling rather than speed. It is deliberately unoptimised. The point is to think clearly.
A second runtime, a native virtual machine, is being built for production.
Who is doing this
Jasbir Singh Sachdeva originated Relationship Oriented Software, and is building the native virtual machine.
Sunny Narula builds Empathy — the language, its compiler, and its Eclipse tooling.
Get in touch
There is nothing to download yet. This page exists so there is somewhere to land.
If you want to know more, or you are building in the same direction, say hello.
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