KSL: Reflection's orthogonality improvement

[Alex Buckley]

There have been many suggestions over the years for some symbology in
the Java language to denote reflective operations over classes and
members. The underlying desire (often unstated) is a metaprogramming
facility in the language that allows abstraction over classes and
members. However, Java decided long ago to solve this problem with
metaDATA in the language -- annotations -- and leave the metaPROGRAMMING
part to ordinary programs that use the reflection or language model APIs
to read annotations -- frameworks like JPA and Dagger.

It's easy to say that metaPROGRAMMING is "obviously" the right thing and
that metaDATA is a poor relation -- in which case I urge a viewing of
"Stewardship: The Sobering Parts", particularly "The
Obvious Way is Often Wrong" at https://youtu.be/2y5Pv4yN0b0?t=28m40s.

Of course this is not the list for protracted discussion of language 
design philosophy, and in any case the "Kitchen Sink Language" is a 
concept from another era, but I thought some wider context might be helpful.

Alex

On 10/12/2015 3:58 AM, bsrbnd wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Just an idea for the "Kitchen Sink Language".
> I hope this subject hasn't already been discussed and that I haven't missed
> anything in the quite big and complex JLS.
> It's said not to think too much if this is a good or bad idea before
> submitting it for the KSL, but I hope I've thought enough...;-)
> Any comments, ideas or suggestions are welcomed.
> No implementation draft has been done until now, but it could be explored
> if comments are encouraging...
>
> Thanks in advance,
> bsrbnd