Reflections on reflection
James O. Coplien · 2012
Though it usually makes its appearance only as a footnote in the broader discourse of object design, reflection is a recurring and sometimes noisily divisive topic in object-orientation. Glimmers of reflection pervade even the darkest corners of the tapestry of object orientation's history. In fact, the broader notion of code's self-knowledge, such as run-time method dispatch, goes to the heart of what differentiates objects from other paradigms. Object orientation, at its roots, was about people and human mental models. It is impossible to make serious headway in these models without reasoning about the system outside of its simple imperative expression. By analogy, the silent movie era of film held that by removing speech, the media of film could both appeal to broader audiences and to tap into the broader human universals that speech obfuscates.