Extensible Programming for the 21st Century

Anonymous Cowardly Lion writes "An interesting article written by a professor at the University of Toronto argues that next-generation programming systems will combine compilers, linkers, debuggers, and that other tools will be plugin frameworks [mirror], 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. It's a very insightful and thought-provoking read. Is this going to be the next generation of extensible programming?"

Comments

Diagrams in Source Code

[Marxist Hacker 42]

One of the footnotes had the best idea I've seen yet- diagrams in source code. Perhaps this could be accomplished by allowing HTML hot links in comments? Or better yet, IMG tags?

Still, the body of the article, the idea of creating new syntax on the fly, is very powerfull. I'm used to it in Scheme, to have it in VB or other .NET languages would be HUGE.