Sjoerd Visscher's weblog

My ideas about new web technology that can change the future of the world wide web.

< Saturday, March 09, 2002 >

Languages used to be the only carriers for abstractions.

Intentional Programming FAQ. (via comp.compilers)

Intentional Programming (IP) is an extendible programming environment based on Active Source which was being researched by Microsoft. Program source is represented as a data structure rather than plain text. One of the most exciting concepts is that you can implement a system using domain-specific abstractions.

Some of the links look interesting. IP is related to aspect oriented programming and subject oriented programming. Last time these were discussed I mentioned my doubts about their adoption by the programming community. I am still interested to hear what others think about these ideas in general, and any practical experience you might have. [Lambda the Ultimate]

One of the links, "Intentional Programming" A Talk With Charles Simonyi, is very interesting:

It's not the languages that are of value, but only the abstractions that the languages carry. [...] It's just that we don't think of abstractions without languages, because languages used to be the only carriers for abstractions. But if you could create an ecology in which an abstraction could survive independent of everything else, then you would see a much more rapid evolution for abstractions, and you would witness the evolution of much more capable abstractions.

I think this will happen within the next 5 years. It could be the "killer app" of RDF.