On Aug 24, 2011, at 2:09 AM, Andreas Rossberg wrote: > On 24 August 2011 01:07, Allen Wirfs-Brock <[email protected]> wrote: >> Also there can be real problems with exposing too much program metadata >> directly to the application layer. I've had lots of experience with >> Smalltalk environments where this was the case and it leads to a muddling of >> the metalayers and the application layers of a system because many >> developers don't understand the concepts of stratification well enough to >> know which methods are not really appropriate for use in application logic. > > That is true, although you cannot really blame the programmers when > the language designers already muddled it up. That very sin has been > committed in JavaScript, for example, by putting arbitrary reflective > methods into innocent intrinsics like Object. I guess programmers > would be much less likely to abuse them if they had a separate home in > an object/module explicitly named Meta, Reflect, or something.
I totally agree. Rather than adding lots of new Object.* methods I'd generally prefer that we start placing future metaprogramming APIs into various modules. I do, however, think that we will need to add Object.defineMethod in ES.next. (BTW, I've been experimenting with what the API for a Mirrors-based reflection module might look like: http://www.wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/228 ) Allen
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