The End of an Era, the Beginning of a New One

I’m a pure product of the Object-Oriented Programming generation. I’ve experimented several different paradigms when I was in engineering school, including formal programming in B, functional programming in OCaml, logical programming with PROLOG and Eclipse (the programming language, not the IDE). But when I started writing software in high school, it was with TurboPascal and then Delphi. And the main language I’ve been using during my studies was Java.

During all that time, I essentially worked on relatively simple problematics, and my end-of-study project was the first one where I started to look for better ways to handle a more complex environment, namely web applications and web services. The revelation came from AndroMDA, an Open-Source Model-Driven Architecture framework that has been my main specialty and domain of research during the past three years or so. As a professional IT consultant, I’ve used it and promoted it on at least 3 customer projects with rather great success.

But today, I think this time is over. I’ll move on to the next step, my next toy. And if you’ve read my previous entry about the limitations of OOP and its comments, you might guess what it is. I was looking for a better way to tackle today’s software issues and go further in my philosophical goal to make technology useful, and I found it. It’s called Language-Oriented Programming.

If you want to know more about it and wonder why I moved onto this so quickly, here are the articles that hit me as another revelation during the past couple of days:

• Language Oriented Programming, by Sergey Dimitriev
• Language Workbenches, by Martin Fowler
• The bridge between MDA and LOP, by Martin Fowler

Now I think I’ll have a much closer look at the practical side of things:

• Jetbrains take on LOP
• XMF

All of my personal projects, including MobiMap, will certainly benefit from this new enlightenment. And I sincerely hope that my day-to-day job will give me the opportunity to work with those concepts…