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by Scott Hanselman.
Original Post: More thoughts around Code Generation and Extensible Programming Systems
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Got forwarded an interesting link from Dr.
Gregory Wilson at the University of Toronto. He's an editor at Dr. Dobbs
as well, and has an article up called Extensible
Programming for the 21st Century that touches on many of the topics
I've been concerned with lately.
He makes some interesting assertions, starting with:
This article argues that next-generation programming systems will accomplish this
by combining three specific technologies:
compilers, linkers, debuggers, and other tools will be plugin frameworks, rather
than monolithic applications;
programmers will be able to extend the syntax of programming languages; and
programs will be stored as XML documents, so that programmers can represent and
process data and meta-data uniformly.
Ok, #1 no problem, we arguable have this with the CLR's model, while #2 is a
little different. I assume he means actual keyword syntax, as opposed to the
way we "changed" programming languages in C with preprocessors and inline functions.
Of course, LISP and Schema use macros to the point where one can't tell where the
language starts or ends. Additionally, custom language constructs like
the "using" statement in C# that "expands" into a try/finally use of the IDisposable
pattern extend the language within a specific context - so I'll buy #2 also.
I used to think that Number 3 is more of a stretch, but then you've got XAML
sneaking up on us as well (not to mention our own foray
into XML and CodeGen).
I supposed the question I am left with after reading his article is - hasn't all this
already happened?
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