Kurt Stephens

http://ftp.squeak.org/Media/AlanKay/Alan%20Kay%20at%20OOPSLA%201997%20-%...

It still hasn’t happened.

Dr. Kay said “The Art of the Metaobject Protocol”
Gregor Kiczales, Jim des Rivières and Daniel G. Bobrow was the best book in 10 years, but wished it had not be written with a Lisp frame-of-reference.

The Art of the Metaobject Protocol
Gregor Kiczales, Jim des Rivières and Daniel G. Bobrow

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=3925

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h9dje/the_most_important_bo...

http://wiki.github.com/kstephens/tort/

The source for LL is available at http://github.com/kstephens/ll/tree/master.

Also located there are the slides from my June 2008 talk at the Chicago Lisp Users Group on the design of the LL object-oriented Scheme interpreter:

http://github.com/kstephens/ll/tree/master%2Fsrc%2Fll%2Fdoc%2Fll_system_...

Advice is a programming construct from the Lisp world that pre-dates aspect-oriented and object-oriented programming. Advice is code that is placed before, after or around an existing function’s body. Examples of advice can be seen in Emacs: in Emacs Lisp, the advice is specified with macro syntax that expands to lambdas.

Wrote this (err… something similar at work :) in Ruby just before I found http://aquarium.rubyforge.org. The advice bodies are bound as methods using Class#define_method with a Proc; the advice has access to privates.

It provides simple :before, :after and :around advice objects that can be applied to and removed from multiple instance methods on multiple classes. It’s not AOP because there are no point-cuts patterns, but it is a bit more object-oriented than a typical Lisp advice macro.

See Aquarium for more industrial-strength AOP-style programming.

A long time ago, in Objective-C on the NeXT, one could often remove nil checks, because all messages to nil would immediately return nil (or 0 depending on the caller’s method signature).

How many times have we seen this in Ruby?:

def foo
  bar && bar.baz && bar.baz.caz("x")
end