Key Abstraction that is coming

[Mark Smith <mark@ssd.neca.nec.com.au>]

Here's my key abstraction for the year

Stephen Riehm wrote:
> 
> The Unix view of the world is not a bad one, but one which compiler
> writer's seem to have discarded. Unix works because programs are
> expected to communicate with each other, via well defined interfaces,
> the principle being that the sum of many parts is much greater than
> could ever be achieved by one whole. Robert's dream could be achieved

The key abstraction here is a well defined interface to make apps talk.
ie like DDE, COM, CORBA, pipes and stdin/out etc. These are all fine
except they assume that everybody understands the format to start with.
Also they have varying levels of impact on your system. pipes/stdin/out
are extremely low cost to implement. CORBA - expensive. DDE/COM non
scalable. 

Anyone seen KQML? We need to start putting AI type reasoning into our
systems so that they can reason about how to communicate with other
apps. making everything talk together is the key thing we all need to
work toward, and reasoning about interfaces seems to be a good way of
looking at the problem.

Alternatively components, and Smalltalk PARTs? but that's interaction at
a different level.

What do you all think?