3. Today

Today, there are several thousand languages, of which around twenty dominate. C is still the pivotal language for fine-tuned hardware programming and for linking different languages: for example, Ada and JavaScript can be made to work together using C. The other languages are more or less equivalent and can be replaced by others. But finding the best way to build a system depends on a multitude of criteria, many of them non-technical.

A description is therefore a complex object which must make it possible to understand both the how (it's done) and the why (it's done in this precise way). A description weaves together code, data structures, links to articles, blogs and texts describing procedures (testing, regeneration, etc.). A description has a history, versions and variants. It is the source of several processes of execution, analysis, document generation and...