Does it really make sense to define aspects in terms of crosscutting?
Yes. The short summary is that it is right to define AOP in terms of crosscutting, because well-written AOP programs have clear crosscutting structure. It would be a mistake to define AOP in terms of “cleaning up tangling and scattering”, because that isn’t particular to AOP, and past programming language innovations also do that, as will future developments. Slides for a long talk on this topic are at http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~gregor/vinst-2-17-01.zip .
Yes. The short summary is that it is right to define AOP in terms of crosscutting, because well-written AOP programs have clear crosscutting structure. It would be a mistake to define AOP in terms of “cleaning up tangling and scattering”, because that isn’t particular to AOP, and past programming language innovations also do that, as will future developments. (Slides for a long talk on this topic were once available at http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~gregor/vinst-2-17-01.zip.
