December 19, 2007

Origin of Advice

Apparently, Gary King needs advice a lot. This reminded me that I posted an article about the origin of advice some time ago in the AOSD mailing list. I think it's a good idea to repost it here to make it available to others as well, so here we go. (I have links for almost all the literature references at the bottom of this article.)

The notion behind advice can be traced back to a paper by Oliver Selfridge [Selfridge 1958]. He introduced the notion of demons that record events as they occur, recognize patterns in those events, and can trigger subsequent events according to patterns that they care about.

A first software system that was obviously heavily influenced by that paper was called PILOT and is described in Warren Teitelman's PhD thesis [Teitelman 1966]. The PhD thesis was supervised by Marvin Minsky, but additionally Warren Teitelman mentions Oliver Selfridge as a strong influence in his acknowledgements. Marvin Minsky and Oliver Selfridge worked both at MIT back then. Anyway, that is the work in which the notion of advice, very similar to before and after advice as we know them today, was actually first introduced. Warren Teitelman later added the concept of advice to BBN Lisp, which was then bought/licensed (?) by Xerox PARC and became Interlisp.

Later, the notion of demons was mentioned in a seminal paper by Marvin Minsky [Minsky 1974] that spawned an interest in framework-based knowledge representation systems. Among others, Daniel Bobrow and Terry Winograd developed and described KRL [Bobrow, Winograd 1976], which was based on the ideas in Marvin Minsky's paper. If I understand correctly, before/after demons played an important role in such systems.

A little bit later, Howard Cannon developed Flavors at MIT, the first object-oriented extension for Lisp, strongly influenced by Alan Kay's Smalltalk. Howard Cannon had written a very influential paper [Cannon 1979-2003] that was, unfortunately, never officially published. He explicitly mentions before/after demons, as do other publications about Flavors, for example [Weinreb, Moon 1980].

I have a copy of Howard Cannon's paper availabe, and I have asked him to make it publicly available, but he still hasn't done this (yet). His is a mind-blowing paper that introduces multiple inheritance, method combinations based on macros - i.e. before and after demons and a first precursor to around methods -, and the notion of meta-protocols that obviously later on turned into metaobject protocols.

The experiences with KRL and Flavors had then been integrated at Xerox PARC into LOOPS (Lisp Object-Oriented Programming System), foremostly by Daniel Bobrow and Mark Stefik, implemented in Interlisp. There is a nice overview page about LOOPS and a download page for the papers mentioned there.

Flavors and LOOPS were chosen as the main bases for the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) as part of the ANSI standardization of Common Lisp. CLOS was developed by representatives of the various existing object-oriented extensions for Lisp. LOOPS / Xerox PARC was represented by Daniel Bobrow and Gregor Kiczales. This was around 1986 - 1988.

CLOS has before/after/around methods. I haven't been able to spot when around methods entered the scene, whether this was already part of LOOPS or whether this was an addition in CLOS. In Flavors, there were only before/after methods, but there was an extra concept called wrappers that effectively allowed one to express the same thing as around methods in CLOS.

One of the most impressive outcomes of the efforts behind LOOPS and CLOS is the book The Art of the Metaobject Protocol [Kiczales, des Rivières, Bobrow 1991], which I think is one of the most important books in the history of computer science (and Alan Kay seems to agree).

Crista Lopes' paper [Lopes 2002] describes the subsequent history how metaobject protocols were turned into what we think of as aspect-oriented programming today. The main motivations, as far as I understand them, were a) to move from a runtime-based approach, which is natural for metaobject protocols, towards a compile-time based approach and b) to make some of the benefits of being able to manipulate the meta-level available to purely base-level code. Advice play an important role in aspect-oriented programming, but instead of advising just single functions, you can advise whole pointcuts, which are essentially sets of functions described in (more or less) declarative ways.

Robert Hirschfeld, myself and others have taken a different turn with Context-oriented Programming, and focus on a more dynamic approach again. We have taken the idea of crosscutting concerns that emerged in the AOSD community, but dropped the idea of pointcuts, and instead concentrated on new and interesting ways to dynamically activate and deactivate layers, which are potentially crosscutting behavioral program variations. Since you can add new layers at any point in time, you can also effectively add new levels of before/after/around methods at runtime as needed, something that can be achieved in plain CLOS only statically through new user-defined method combinations, or requires recompilation in aspect-oriented language extensions like AspectJ. Here are some links for Context-oriented Programming:

I agree that advice are an important concept in programming, but we have still not seen all the possible and interesting variations yet. Although they have a long history already, there is still a future ahead for them.

References


Reflection in Potsdam

Charlotte Herzeel and I had been invited by Robert Hirschfeld to give presentations at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam, Germany about the CLOS Metaobject Protocol and 3-Lisp about two weeks ago. These presentations have been recorded and are now online for your viewing pleasure:

You need RealPlayer to see this.

December 06, 2007

European Lisp Symposium 2008 - Call for Papers

1st European Lisp Symposium

Bordeaux, France, May 22-23, 2008

LaBRI, Université Bordeaux 1


Important Dates

  • Submission of research papers: February 11, 2008

  • Work-in-progress papers: March 24, 2008

  • Author notification: April 7, 2008

  • First final versions due: April 28, 2008


Accepted research papers will be invited for a special issue of the Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS). See the symposium website for more details.

Scope

The European Lisp Symposium 2008 invites high quality papers about novel research results, insights and lessons learned from practical applications, and educational perspectives, all involving Lisp dialects, including Common Lisp, Scheme, ISLISP, Dylan, and so on.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Language design and implementation techniques

  • Language integration, interoperation and deployment

  • Experience reports and case studies

  • Reflection and meta-level architectures

  • Educational approaches

  • Software adaptation and evolution

  • Configuration management

  • Artificial intelligence

  • Large and ultra-large-scale systems

  • Development methodologies

  • Development support and environments

  • Persistent systems

  • Scientific computing

  • Parallel and distributed computing

  • Data mining

  • Semantic web

  • Dynamic optimization

  • Innovative applications

  • Hardware and virtual machine support

  • Domain-oriented programming


We also encourage submissions about past approaches that have been largely forgotten about, as long as they are presented in a new setting.

We invite submissions in two categories:
original contributions and work-in-progress papers.

  • Original contributions have neither been published previously nor are under review by other refereed events or publications. Research papers should describe work that advances the current state of the art, or presents old results from a new perspective. Experience papers should be of broad interest and should describe insights gained from substantive practical applications. The program committee will evaluate each contributed paper based on its relevance, significance, clarity, and originality.

    Accepted papers will be published in the Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS). Authors of accepted papers are expected to present their work at the symposium main track in Bordeaux on May 23, 2008.


  • Work in progress describes ongoing work that is not ready for publication yet, but would benefit strongly from feedback by other researchers, practitioners and educators. Such contributions will not be published in the symposium proceedings, but will be made available at the symposium website. The work-in-progress track will be organized as a series of writers' workshops where authors work together to improve their papers. Some authors who submit papers for the main track will be suggested to contribute their work in this track instead, if the program committee decides that their submission is not yet ready for a publication.

    The writers' workshops will take place at the symposium in Bordeaux on May 22, 2008.


Submissions

Papers for the main track must be submitted electronically, preferably as PDF or PostScript file (level 1 or 2). However, submissions in RTF or Word format are also accepted. Initial submissions may not exceed 15 pages in the J.UCS style, including all appendices. (Invited papers for the journal publication will have a page limitation of 25 pages in the same format.) See the symposium website for more details, including about the submission procedure.

Papers for the work-in-progress track may be in PDF, PostScript level 1 or 2, RTF or Word, and may not exceed 25 pages. There are no further requirements on their format. Papers for the work-in-progress track must be sent via email to pascal.costanza@vub.ac.be.


Program Chair

  • Pascal Costanza, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium


Program Committee

  • Marco Antoniotti, Universita Milano Bicocca, Italy

  • Marie Beurton-Aimar, Université Bordeaux 1, France

  • Jerry Boetje, College of Charlston, USA

  • Theo D'Hondt, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

  • Irène Durand, Université Bordeaux 1, France

  • Marc Feeley, Université de Montréal, Canada

  • Erick Gallesio, Universite de Nice / Sophia Antipolis, France

  • Rainer Joswig, Independent Consultant, Germany

  • António Leitão, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal

  • Henry Lieberman, MIT, USA

  • Scott McKay, ITA Software, Inc., USA

  • Ralf Möller, Hamburg University of Technology, Germany

  • Nicolas Neuss, Universität Karlsruhe, Germany

  • Kent Pitman, PTC, USA

  • Christophe Rhodes, Goldsmiths College, University of London, United Kingdom

  • Jeffrey Mark Siskind, Purdue University, USA

  • Didier Verna, EPITA Research and Development Laboratory, France