Ideally, being a programmer means I can do anything on a computer. I have complete freedom, complete control. But in reality, programmers today have very It is time to begin the next technology revolution in software development, and the shape of this revolution is becoming more and more clear. The next programming paradigm is nearly upon us. It is not yet fully formed—different parts have diff...

Multiple dispatching and the visitor pattern are approaches to making object-oriented programs more extensible. Both have a flavor of pattern matching, thereby moving objectoriented programming closer to functional programming. The key idea of these approaches can be crystallized as a notion of visitor which lies between functions and objects. Can this idea be developed into a new form of visit...

The promise of agent-based systems is leading towards the development of autonomous, heterogeneous agents, designed by a variety of research/industrial groups and distributed over a variety of platforms and environments. Teamwork among these heterogeneous agents is critical in realizing the full potential of these systems and scaling up to the demands of large-scale applications. Unfortunately,...

This dissertation describes the design and implementation of a general-purpose object-oriented (OO) programming language, Classages. The novel object model of Classages gives programmers refined control over modeling the interactions inside OO software, with inspirations drawn from human sociology. Key innovations include the language constructs of Mixers and Connectors as encapsulation-enforce...

Context-dependent behavior is becoming increasingly important for a wide range of application domains, from pervasive computing to common business applications. Unfortunately, mainstream programming languages do not provide mechanisms that enable software entities to adapt their behavior dynamically to the current execution context. This leads developers to adopt convoluted designs to achieve t...

together behavior and data into a single conceptual (and physical) entity. Object-orientation is reflected in the entire spectrum of current software development methodTzilla Elrad, Robert E. Filman, and Atef Bader, Guest Editors

Agent-oriented programming is a new paradigm for conceptualizing a computational system (Shoham, 1993), differing primarily from object-oriented programming in the inclusion of mental state in each of the processes. This paper offers two special-case versions (or idioms) of agent-oriented programming that encapsulates master-slave and peer-peer type interactions in simple protocols. These two i...

Today’s consumer network applications are composed of complex sets of interconnected hardware and software components. Application providers build component-level workflows to provide required functional properties and quality of service (QoS). However, to enhance the quality of user experience (QoE), applications are nowadays exposed to consumers as sets of widgets, i.e. compact and fully func...

The predominant design of object-oriented programming languages today provides insufficient support for interface abstraction and implementation inheritance, a limitation that forces software components to be unnecessarily biased towards particular implementations of other components. This scatters implementation bias across a system and impairs its ability to evolve. In this paper we trace the...

Object-Oriented Programming is enabled by advances in compiler technology and programming language design supporting en-capsulation and inheritance. This technical adjustment has had a surprisingly broad impact on strategies for design and development of software. This paper explains what Object-Oriented Programming is, why it has attracted so much interest, and then critically examines its imp...