[aosd-discuss] "AOP considered harmful"

[Rickard Öberg]

Mira Mezini wrote:

 > First to the point of "being good enough to expand the predicates in your
 > mind at any time". Why would you want to expand, at all? The point is 
that
 > the predicates are first-class abstractions / means of referencing, 
words in
 > your language. Did you ever want to expand a while-loop down to the jump
 > structure needed to implement looping? I doubt... to use Gregor's wording
 > from one of his talks you probably "say *while* when you mean it!". 
Or, do
 > you try to expand down to the method dispatch and interpretation of
 > statements in the method body in the context of the receiver object 
any time
 > you see a method call?


As long as the system is working: no. If the system isn't behaving the 
way I thought my abstractions would make it behave: yes. If a "while" 
loop isn't doing what I thought I told it to do, then yes, I will have 
to mentally expand it to figure out what I did wrong. For "while" loops 
that is usually doable, but for pointcuts which can be pretty abstract 
it is an inhuman task to debug mentally.

 > The point I am trying to make is, once you build abstractions, you 
look at
 > them as being elementary units for the next level of complexity.


As above. If the abstraction works: yes. If the abstraction doesn't work 
(i.e. doesn't do what you thought it should do): no.

 > I do strongly question this, because it is somehow implying that AOP is
 > making things more complex.


AOP is making some things more complex and some things less complex. 
Solution: use tools to make the more complex things less complex, so 
that all things are less complex. Problem solved :-)

/Rickard