Archive for the ‘Extensible Programming’ Category

Update on Extensible Programming

Sunday, July 30th, 2006

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article about extensible programming systems, which I believe are the Next Big Thing in programming. I've had a few pings about this recently, so I thought I'd post my current link collection: The Wikipedia entry (no idea who wrote it) The Slashdot discussion ...

External Programming Interfaces

Thursday, December 29th, 2005

This article, by Eamonn McManus, is a nice little summary of API design principles. It contains a bit of motherhood and apple pie---nobody would ever set out to make an API difficult to learn or hard to use, for example---but the specifics are good (particularly the discussion of why ...

You Need a Debugger to Change the World

Thursday, October 27th, 2005

Following links from the latest Subtext demo, I came to Martin Fowler's article "Language Workbenches: The Killer-App for Domain Specific Languages?". It's well written and thought provoking, like everything else Martin writes, but I think there's one glaring oversight. Two thirds of the way through, he says: ...there are three ...

Subtext

Tuesday, October 25th, 2005

There's a new demo of Jonathan Edwards' Subtext system online. This is the best example I've seen yet of an extensible programming system. It's pretty cool---once you stop insisting that programs have to be directly presentable as ASCII strings, many new thoughts become possible. Quote: "It's good to remember ...

Extensible Programming Slashdotted (Unfortunately)

Tuesday, January 18th, 2005

My ACM Queue article on extensible programming systems just got slashdotted. Once again, it's clear that most of the posters haven't bothered to read the article: even the headliner seems to think that I believe programmers will all be typing XML tags five years from now. The article's real point ...

Is Code Optimization Relevant?

Thursday, November 25th, 2004

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~pugh/IsCodeOptimizationRelevant.pdf

Microsoft Monad: it’s hot, it’s (almost) here

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004

A link in Jon Udell's blog [1] pointed me at Jeffrey Snover's Monad, a super-shell for the next version of Windows. It contains a lot of very cool ideas; if you'd like to take a look, go to [2], click "Watch It Now", then go to Section 5 of ...

Apt and Extensible Programming

Wednesday, October 13th, 2004

Over in the java.net community forums, Bruce Chapman suggests that we deprecate javac in the next major Java release. Yup, that's right: no more javac. Instead, he suggests that we all start using apt, which allows developers to run their own code inside the compiler. As he ...

E4X and Configuration

Wednesday, October 13th, 2004

Jon Udell posted some more comments about E4X today. If you haven't been following along, it's a proposal to make XML a native data type in JavaScript, so that programmers can manipulate it as naturally as they do strings or lists. The most exciting thing for me about E4X (and ...