After actually reading a lot of the paper, the conclusions of commenting programmers is raw ignorance. It appears some of them read the introduction (abstract) and thought they "knew" what the article was about. If one reads it, one discovers that the goal of the work is to provide a means of doing several interesting tasks (that I'd like to see done in Eiffel and placed into the IDE):
1. Code search: In my universe, is there any code that ________? -- some form of "wheat-keyword" query that can be quickly matched against a database held as metadata about the code universe.
2. Code completion: As I am hand-coding my feature (not just the line or even instruction I am typing), is there some other feature that looks like what I have already typed that the remainder of that feature can be applied to the one I am typing to "auto-complete" it?
3. Code reduction: Is there a language subset, such that a reduced keyword language could be hand-coded and the "fluff" or "chaff" filler be computed rather than typed, essentially making for a smaller and more powerful programming language and paradigm (when linked to #1 and #2 above)?
These are very powerful and interesting questions. They are not implying that Java is 5% meaningful and 95% meaningless. It is simply implying a systematic means of code-reduction in an effort to make tools that do #1, #2, and/or #3 above!
Fine article and good find. Thank you for sharing!!!
