extensible languages

[Roger Critchlow-2]

Apropos some of the discussion and thinking around scripting language
extensions to Java and using the Eclipse IDE as an aid to programming,
this article:

        http://pyre.third-bit.com/~gvwilson/xmlprog.html

was slashdotted today.  In short, the author argues that compilers,
linkers, and debuggers should become plugin frameworks and source code
should become XML so that extensions can pass arbitrary metadata through
the code generation phase and the raw metadata (properties, manifests,
etc) can use the base language to compute itselves.

Here's one of the author's footnotes which neatly sums up part of the
cognitive dissonance he wants to resolve:

One of the other great ironies of the early 21st Century is that it is
trivial for secretaries to put cubicle floorplans in their documents,
but nearly impossible for programmers to put class diagrams in code.

-- rec --