Q. What's your position on aspect-oriented programming?Read the full interview: Sun's Gosling: New Java Flavors Brewing
AOP is kind of a complicated one for me, because AOP is one of these things where the theory sounds really good. I actually mostly like the theory. The way it turns out in practice tends to be pretty dangerous. It's fraught with all kinds of problems. You know when the AOP folks talk about AOP they list you like three or four use cases for AOP and they actually mostly make sense, although they have problems in the details. But there actually aren't very many use cases outside of that. And when you find people who are using AOP, the average ones that I've talked to have been using it for things that are just like incredibly inappropriate. It's like a really, really, really bad idea to be doing what they're doing. And so I feel very conflicted because on the one hand I basically like the concept, but I don't think that the research community has really figured out how to encapsulate those in a mechanism that really works for people. It's like giving them a chainsaw without any safety instructions.
Do you like Groovy?
I think Groovy is pretty interesting. I think they're being fairly conservative. I think they could be a little more outlandish and get a little more interesting.
remember sort of reading through their syntax list and saying, "Oh, why didn't you do this and why didn't you do that?" There were some things about the way that they did sort of the equivalence of declarations and some things about the way they did case switch statements I sort of felt like writing them this long letter and saying, "What? Why didn't you do it this way?" You know (laughter). So they actually had some neat stuff in there.