Intentional Programming: Asymptotic Fun?
Charles Simonyi · 2002
This note is based on Gregor Kiczales’ position paper on Aspect-Oriented Programming: “AOP, The Fun has Just Begun”. I am a big fan of AOP. It has working and useful examples, and it brings into focus a key fault of traditional languages and OOP in particular, namely that modularity or refinement by itself can provide for a proper separation of concerns. It can not. Gregor describes the false hope of the traditionalists this way: “Many people ... suggest ...[that such concerns] could be modularized in other ways including the use of patterns, reflection, of ‘careful coding’.” I can also testify that this happens, especially the “careful coding” exhortation which is used frequently by language designers and by management to tell programmers that if the software is difficult to modify or difficult to share, the problem is with them – their coding must be obviously below par, since the language that they must use (ADA, Java, Modula, etc.) has many advertised features that support modularity.