Rafe Colburn pointed to an article on aspect programming, which is described as "the next phase of software engineering". Someone on the javalanche mailing list then sent along a link to this article, which says that "Xerox PARC has extended the Java programming language to allow aspect-oriented programming."
In the first article, Grady Brooch (described as "one of the fathers of object oriented programming (OOP) and co-founder of Unified Modelling Language (UML)") says:
If I were to look into my crystal ball in terms of the next generation of programming languages, my guess is it would be an aspect-oriented language…