language parallax

So I’ve actually put “pen to paper” and started the prospectus. The title remains to be determined. That will probably be the last thing I figure out. At this point it seems like a hodge-podge of ideas from the last 11 years.

The two main threads are these:

1) What is required of an architecture that supports DSL-driven web application development, but also exposes languages and interfaces that are “downstream” from the DSL. Most notably the database schema.

2) Those same requirements also happen to enable “multi-view programming”. I’ll argue that this is potentially more true to the spirit of aspect-oriented programming than current AOP implementations are.

What is this list of requirements? Some are more concrete than others. On the abstract side of things, we should stop thinking of code as text. This means that:

* Languages are objects in their own right

* Expressions in these languages should be changed using structured editors (which could/should be generated form the language descriptor)

This has a lot of concrete upshots that I’m sorting through now. For starters, it means rethinking source code control, diff, and merge.

More later. Much more.