Re: Rather, DSSLs increase modularity, productivity

[Michael Vanier <address@hidden>]

Miles,

What kind of byte-code manipulations are you talking about?  I know nothing
about this, but it sounds interesting.

Mike


> From: Miles Egan <miles@caddr.com>
> Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 21:28:35 -0800
> 
> On Sun, 2003-11-16 at 19:43, Michael Vanier wrote:
> > Java, whatever else one might say about it, has removed item (2) from
> > consideration for most programmers.  Item (1) is still a factor, and I must
> > say I prefer a more interactive programming environment than java usually
> > provides.  But that has little to do with type systems, I think.
> 
> I think it's interesting that almost all of the radical changes made to
> Java since its inception (reflection, generics, byte-code manipulation,
> anonymous classes, third party scripting systems) seem to have been made
> in an effort to loosen the type system or circumvent it entirely.  Java
> programmers don't seem ready to abandon the type system completely, but
> some things seem to be next to impossible to do without deeper
> metaprogramming than the core language allows.
> 
> One of my biggest reservations about the newest crop of Handley-Milner
> fpls is that they make useful metaprogramming almost impossible.  It
> doesn't seem to me that this is necessarily a consequence of a strong
> static type system but I could be wrong.  I'd really like to see a
> language with the introspection abilities of Python or Ruby but also the
> ability to lock down types at least as narrowly as Java.
> 
> miles
>