Re: [abc] ICFP stuff

Hi Oege,

I think those are all good points. I wonder if we should have
a web page of "thoughts on uses of AspectJ", with a subsection on
future uses via extensions of AspectJ. It is certainly something
we will be asked a lot, and if we have it on our web site, then
prog lang/compiler type people visiting the web site might get some
new insights into the uses of aspects.

Laurie

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On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Oege de Moor wrote:

>
>
> 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 15:50:53 2004