Position paper on 'How far harmonisation?'

The era of employing a grand monolithic approach to develop data processing systems is coming to an end. Systems developers are now realizing that there are many different ways to specify and program systems. While the traditional IF… THEN, DO WHILE approach is popular in many situations, it is far from being the best or only way. For instance, a medical diagnosis system might be implemented best with rules and an inference engine. In other situations, conditioning a neural network or genetic algorithm could produce the desired results much more efficiently. Elsewhere, a predicate logic or functional expression would be the best way to specify an application. In other words, if a system can be specified in many ways, why not choose the mix of approaches best for the problem at hand? Why be bound to only one way of doing things, when a combination of approaches might produce a result that is more economical, accurate, understandable, and elegant?