Comment by lloeki

> AOP always felt like a hack. I used it with C++

Colour me surprised that a language which is the practical definition of bolted-on features has an implementation that feels like a bolted-on hack ;)

> early on

Also the "early" AOP was very much focused on a formal definition and a specific approach, further entrenched by how Java did it.

But you don't need to do AOP "by the letter" to do AOP: as long as you have cross-cutting concerns that you sprinkle over your code you're doing AOP, even if you're not calling that pointcut and stuff.

Python decorators, C# attributes, Ruby's whole "monkey patching" (e.g alias method chaining pattern, or simply modules combined with the ancestor system and message passing) are all pretty much variations that fit well with the AOP paradigm.

I'd argue that a lot of people are doing AOP without ever realising it.