Metaprogramming, Toast and the Future of Development Tools
Eric Lippert has a post on metaprogramming; the meat of his
article is:
I'm going out on a limb here to hazard two predictions: first, languages will become more declarative. Second, there will be more special-purpose languages...I suspect that in the future programs that write declarative programs will proliferate.Eric thinks the future will be XML (n.b. is "schematizability" a word?), and that certainly seems to be the foregone conclusion. Biztalk 2004 has already gone down the road Eric outlines; you create mappings in a GUI, which generates XSLT, which in turn is used to generate code and create an assembly that BizTalk loads. I know that all the old Lispers out there are going to hit the roof reading this, and Eric doesn't speak for MS necessarily, but it's a big statement about where MS is planning on taking development tools. The bright spot for Lisp is that a mapping into XML is pretty straightforward, so concievably in the .NET of the future, your top level programming environment could be Lisp, which gets converted to XML, which gets IL compiled. Eric assumes the developer will be coding in an imperative language, but it doesn't necessarily have to be so.