Some thoughts circling back to semantic programming now

OK. So this declarative style of programming can be seen as the systematic laying out of the semantic structure of the program at the same time we are building the code. I'm a little worried that this structure is still very thin (that is, the extremely complex ramifications of meaning that come along with human understanding of a program are missing in this structure), but it's still a beginning.

Let's consider this: we could see the Class::Declarative structure as a sort of prototype. But knowing sufficient amounts of semantics for any given class, we could take a working structure and "compile" it into a pure-Perl structure that doesn't depend on Class::Declarative at all. In fact, we could compile it into any language for which we knew how to express the semantics of the structure.

This is important. This is what we will end up doing much, much farther down the road.

As a more proximate goal, this is what I was fumbling towards in January. I read January's posts and they seem sort of naive. I think that bodes well.

Let's posit a set of semantics that talks about databases, PHP code, Web pages, and AJAX. That's what sproggler is talking about. This declarative-plus-semantic framework would be the backbone of that system, and it could express itself using templates of some kind.

These templates are symbolic units. Remember symbolic units? They connect semantic units (the nodes in a Class::Declarative structure) with syntactic units (the pieces of code we compile), and they are mediated by templates of varying degrees of abstraction. So at some point in the very near future, we're going to want to think hard about them.