I think two trends will change the way we develop software in the future: Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and Model Driven Software Development (MDSD). Being an OO programmer for 20 years and working on Java and eclipse, that's not surprising. Eclipse hosts the AspectJ project and there is a AspectC/C++ plugin. The eclipse Generative Model Transformer project (GMT) is an interesting research ground for MDSD. OpenArchitectureWare also provides eclipse plugins for MDSD.
However, most of the programmers that only develop in C have no clue what's coming. It might sound for them like another hype (similar to OOP) and they feel it won't change their world because it's so far away and esoteric. But AOP and MDSD is closer to their world than they think. In some sense AOP and MDSD act like an "advanced" C preprocessor. Adding "aspects" today is often done #ifdefs and complex macros are used to "generate" code. Those lost in #ifdes and #defines might find it helpful to get new tools at their hand that allow them to do what they always did but at a higher level....
After working for 9 years on modeling tools, I sure hope it finally takes of. It's been a very slow evolution but hopefully as the quality of the tools increase, modeling will become more appealing to the masses.
ReplyDeleteAlso it's very cool to see that the AspectC++ gang have an integration for the CDT. It's clients like these that should strike the fear of changing CDT's APIs into us.
Interesting stuff Michael!