Re: [abc] ICFP stuff

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:

> People have been asking me what use AspectJ is, and I've been (mostly)
> stifling my urge to say what I think of the language

... stress the big ideas, not the particular language gripes ...

> and instead trotting
> out some examples
> - tracing and logging (dismissively)

It's easy to dismiss those applications with a macho-attitude that says
"I don't need to do debugging" but in practice it's very important to be
able to do these things in a non-intrusive manner. Isn't it time we
give programmers more than the "ASSERT" statement when most of their
time is spent debugging? The boundary with your third point

> - hybrid static/dynamic program checking (e.g. null pointer, LoD)
> (this one is obviously good since I can talk about the advantages of a
> better compiler)

is fluid. Stop apologising (to yourself and others) for language features
that help with debugging and dynamic measurements, it's useful and
interesting.

> Any other suggestions?

I like the usual applications of open classes, with the canonical example
of extending a compiler. This leads up to one of the most important
applications, namely altering code where the source is not under your
control. Think of the aspect as a patch that documents your local changes:
a good example would be the changes that ajc made to BCEL (but they
didn't do that with an aspect, yet, of course).

The chapter on thread safety (in Swing applications) in Laddad is pretty
convincing, I think, as is the one on transaction management.

>
> Also, amongst the usual conference adverts was a piece of paper
> advertising a random piece of software. We should do the same in future...

Yes, we should bring flyers to OOPSLA!

-O
Received on Wed Sep 22 15:46:55 2004