Extensible Programming for the 21st Century

In his article Dr. Gregory V. Wilson says

Functions, user-defined types, operator overloading, and generics (such as C++ templates) are no longer enough: tomorrow's languages must allow programmers to add entirely new kinds of information to programs, and to control how that information is processed.

Next-generation programming systems will accomplish this by combining three specific technologies:

• compilers, linkers, debuggers, and other tools will be plugin frameworks, rather than monolithic applications;
• programmers will be able to extend the syntax of programming languages; and
• programs will be stored as XML documents, so that programmers can represent and process data and meta-data uniformly.