August 14, 2005

Lisp and AOP : One in the same?

Berlin Brown's Weblog : Weblog

I've often wondered how long it would take people to realize the relationship that AOP has to Lisp. To me the connection is so blatantly obvious that I've just assumed that others from the Lisp world -- or better said, those who have a background in Lisp but have since been forced into an OOP way of hacking such that they could put bread on the table -- felt the exact same way. But up until now I have never seen any evidence that others have made the connection.

The above link was recently posted to comp.lang.lisp.

I mentioned AOP(aspect oriented programming), this isn't the full use of AOP(you probably want something like AspectL or AspectJ).

"Suppose we want to do logging at both the beginning and the end of each function body. This will result in crosscutting all classes that have at least one function." -- On AOP

Ok, so maybe this doesn't come right out and say it (you'll need to read the whole post to understand why I am connecting the two), but the assumption is that AOP and Lisp contain similarities -- which they do -- in fact in private conversation with a few hacker friends I've even gone as far as suggesting that Aspect-Oriented Programming is Lisp's backdoor entry into the mind of an OOP developer. While AOP is obviously in and of itself its very own entity it seems that if instead of trying to think about AOP from an OOP perspective, think about it from a Lisp perspective. Doing so will hopefully help separate AOP from the logging and security role it seems to have been pigeon-holed into and open the mind of OOP hackers into realizing that AOP can be used for the same things Lisp can be used for -- or better said, EVERYTHING! :)

Enjoy your Aspect-Oriented List Processing Day :)