6 March 2007 - 15:03The transparent container and LISP

A while ago I wrote a post about a particular type of container that I called the transparent container (*), a container which basically binds various pieces of functionality to each other transparently.
Anyway, I was thinking today that this container exhibits features pretty close to LISP: easy binding between components, the ability to create languages pretty easily, dynamic typing to an extent, etc… I can hear a lot of people starting to complain that this is basically a new instance of reinventing the wheel, that we should all start developing in LISP in order to become more productive, etc… I think they are wrong, because there is one huge difference between this transparent container and LISP: the fact that you can isolate development between this LISP-style programming (programming in the container itself) and the regular Java programming (developing the beans that are bound together by the container developers). Which means that you can split your work-force much more efficiently according to what they do best: domain experts along with the architects would develop the application by binding it in the container, while the ‘regular’ (if you wish) developers would code the Java beans.
One strong point of the transparent container would be management: it lets you divide your tasks a lot more easily than LISP. In LISP you do not have a boundary which splits complexity, pretty much everybody is working in the same environment. If you don’t ‘get’ LISP you are pretty much an outsider, and getting LISP is pretty rare from what I remember in university. This container brings forward some of the powers of LISP and makes them available to a small team that is comfortable with this environment, it is a lot more flexible than the all-or-nothing proposition that LISP gives you.

* For however has any questions about the name, I picked it out of a hat. I need a name for it so I’ll call it this way. I could call it Spring, especially since Spring is the only container coming close to it, but I decided to go for an independent name.