An Ontology to Understand Programming Cocktails

An ever-growing landscape of programming technologies (tools, languages, libraries and frameworks) has rapidly become the norm in many domains of computer programming— Web Development being the most noticeable example. The concurrent use of many compartmentalised technologies has advantages: it allows for flexibility in implementation, while also improving reusability. On the other hand, this proliferation tends to create convoluted development workflows that must be (painstakingly) planned, managed and maintained. The combination of multiple languages, libraries, frameworks and tools (Ingredients) in a single project effectively forms a Programming Cocktail, that can rapidly become cognitive and financially onerous. Aiming at understanding these complex situations, an ontology was created to provide a formal and structured analysis of these cocktails. It emerged from a survey of technologies that several companies are currently using to develop their systems, and aims to provide support for better understanding, classifying and characterising Programming Cocktails. This paper presents not only the ontology itself, but also the consequent knowledge that was constructed and structured through its development.