The Paradoxical Success of Aspect-Oriented Programming

Essay

Aspect-oriented programming is discussed as a promising new technology. Like object-oriented programming, it is beginning to pervade all areas of software engineering. With its growing popularity, practitioners and academics alike are beginning to wonder whether they should start looking into or it, or otherwise risk having missed an important development. The author of this essay finds that much of aspect-oriented programming's success seems to be based on the conception that it improves both modularity and the structure of code, while in fact, it actually works against the primary purposes of the two, namely independent development and understandability of programs. Not seeing any way of fixing this situation, he thinks the success of aspect-oriented programming to be paradoxical.