Giggling
You ever have days when you can't stop giggling? As an ex-COBOL programmer, I laughed out loud at the idea of object-oriented COBOL. Today I'm giggling at a paper entitled What does aspect-oriented programming mean to Cobol? (PDF). I can tell you want it means, but this should be a family-friendly blog. AOP was another way to get around the limitations of inheritance, but I think it's fundamentally broken. Applying a fundamentally broken technology to an obsolete (yet needed) technology just leaves me in a fit of giggles.
I have visions of COBOL programmers screaming "we're relevant, honestly", but no one hearing them. They're only relevant because there's so much legacy code out there written in COBOL. We've no choice but to keep this coal-fired programming language running.
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You realise the irony of posting this on a Perl site, right? :-)
(Or was that your point?)
Curiously, we're about to start using AOP at work.
We'll be using it for timing metrics, some tracing, and possibly some logging.
There are a few specific tasks that AOP is really good for, but I agree most of the time it causes more problems than it solves.
I think that AOP has one thing in common with exceptions: the code should function identically both with and without them. Thus, if the application depends on AOP, you've made an error. For metrics, tracing and logging (particularly if temporary), AOP seems OK.