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

Let's see here..

[k98sven]

If I recall correctly,
Fourth-Generation languages was going to be the future of programming back in the early 80's?
(Machine code, Fortran/Basic-type languages and Pascal/C-type languages being the supposed first, second and third generations, IIRC)

Then in the early 90's.. OOP was going to save the world. Not that it hasn't had impact, but it certainly hasn't fundamentally changed things.

And now it's XML that's going to save the programmers, while the old-timers whine that we should all really be using Lisp.

Not that I'm a computer-language conservative myself, but it's worth pointing out that historically, there has been quite a big discrepancy between which languages the Comp-Sci researchers feel everyone should be using, and the ones which actually are used.

The more things change...

[treerex]

that next-generation programming systems will combine compilers, linkers, debuggers,

...THINK Pascal (for the Mac) was doing this almost 20 years ago: the editor served as the front end to the compiler --- so the syntax highlighting in the THINK Pascal editor was driven by the lexer (really was the lexer): you knew about syntax errors immediately. The debugger was fully integrated into the environment. It was really sweet, and probably one of the best programming environments ever written.

and that other tools will be plugin frameworks

Like Unix pipes and Eclipse?

Tomorrow arrived yesterday and appears today.

Re:been done

[ron_ivi]

Agreed, and even mentioned in TFA:

3. You don't need XML to do this.

Scheme proves by example that everything described in this article could have been done twenty years ago, and could be done today without XML.

And IMHO lisp's syntax has always had a nicer structure than XML's repetitive redundancy.

_<whatever>
__<you> want to do in <xml>xml</xml>
__</you>
_</whatever>

is nothing but a set of s-expressions that read much nicer in a lisp-like syntax:

(whatever
_(you want to do in (xml xml)
_)
)

IMveryHO the big failure of the lisp guys of old was that they were so proud of how many ')' they could put next to each other that it made their code harder to read than necessary. I bet XML would have failed too if it were commonly written

<whatever>
_<you> want to do in <xml> xml </xml></you></whatever>

(and yes, the _ are just there for /.'s formatting)