[aosd-discuss] "AOP considered harmful"

[Eric Tanter]

On Apr 25, 2005, at 15:34, Sean Gilbertson wrote:

> Perhaps debugging can be more complicated - I don't feel qualified to 
> comment, since I haven't used AOP enough - but can it really be more 
> complicated or confusing than OOP debugging?.

I guess this is a problem of _current_ AOP implementations rather than 
AOP itself.
As of today, the Java VM is not "aspect aware", and debuggers are 
usually pretty tied to the VM (eg via its debugging interface). Code is 
preprocessed in order for aspects to apply. I'm pretty convinced that 
in the end AOP needs to be supported by the main language (not an 
extension based on transformation), that is also, the VM. And then 
debugging of AO programs should be as hard -oups, sorry, as easy- as 
debugging of OO programs.

-- Eric