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

Just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Extensible, so that each programmer can use a whole heap of functional and syntatic elements that no other programmer has ever heard of...

XML, so stuff that doesn't need to be human-readable is human-readable, and the whole mess is a good six times larger than it needs to be...

Plugins, so that everything can be dependant upon proprietary, bulky, inefficient runtime engines...

I am all for progress, and not married to old-school solutions by any means. However, some things can sound good in theory without actually representing progress.

Re:Can't wait

[X]

Now you can do this in C++, but look at what you need to implement to do it

It would be great, if instead, I could hook into the compiler and tell it exactly how it should handle vectors.

Umm... what makes you think that programming a compiler is going to be more straight forward than doing generic programming? That seems like a huge assumption to me.

The closest thing I've seen to what this article talks about was CLOS's MOP, which was great, but once again, a lot of people had a hard time groking it.