Nice article. The first thing that came to mind when seeing the title was "but circular dependencies just mean that your layers are wrong and those should all be in the same layer" and funnily enough that's exactly what's explained in the article!
What would be interesting would be to organize modules into named layers--instead of just explicit 1-by-1 module dependencies (i.e. edges). I have not seen a language do that yet.
Another interesting thing that I haven't seen touched on in more mainstream languages is the idea of bidirectional interfaces. The somewhat DSL-like NesC language had this, primarily driven by the need to write device drivers that serviced interrupts (and events).
> What would be interesting would be to organize modules into named layers--instead of just explicit 1-by-1 module dependencies (i.e. edges). I have not seen a language do that yet.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're describing namespaces here
What would be interesting would be to organize modules into named layers--instead of just explicit 1-by-1 module dependencies (i.e. edges). I have not seen a language do that yet.
Another interesting thing that I haven't seen touched on in more mainstream languages is the idea of bidirectional interfaces. The somewhat DSL-like NesC language had this, primarily driven by the need to write device drivers that serviced interrupts (and events).