On Nov 2, 5:00 am, "Rustom Mody" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 11/1/07, Kay Schluehr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > AOP was a research that gone nowhere - at least not in its orginal AspectJ > > form: > > declaring aspect code that targets business code, weaving the aspect code > > into the > > business app using a code generator. There was much excitement about it > > around 2001 > > that faded away > > Maybe so but five years maybe too short to decide this. > > Consider that the core ideas of LISP -- interpretation, > garbage-collection, s-exps-as-universal data-structure (now XML) have > taken 50 years to get into the mainstream. > > Of course its also true that the number of dead-end ideas exceeds the > successes. > My own guess is that AOP via higher order functions and metaclasses > will be more successful than via aspectj and code-generation. > > In short python will do better than java. And so.. thanks for the link
Yes. The methodological apparatus and terminology of AOP was invented for Java or another language that fits cleanly into the OO paradigm of "classes first". Aspects were a complementary modularization mechanism for crosscutting features that did not fit into the "classes first" ideology but were nevertheless modelled after classes. When you look at AspectJ code you will find all kinds of lexical dependencies since aspect code had to determine its join points using code pattern. Very brittle! Now compare this to decorators which do not have to declare where they are applied. You just decorate an appropriate function / method. Since higher order functions give you all this for free there isn't a real need to continue the semiotic legacy of AOP. Note that I actually do believe that code generation will increase in importance but not as an ordinary software engineering technique that provides better modularization of application code. I consider this as a failed idea. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
