An Introduction to Metaprogramming

This last blog post was really short, a lot more so than most of the others we’ve been reading so being honest I’m not really sure I have enough to say about it. It was very much an introductory kind of writing just showing a tiny bit of what metaprogramming is and a couple of examples of it in action. I do like the concept, metaprogramming is something I actually have used before, at first without realizing it was a known, named, thing and only realizing it was about a year ago. It’s a very useful concept, especially on those languages that can be done at runtime, meaning you don’t generate the source for other program but expand the running program’s capabilities while its running. Python, Ruby and JS are good examples of languages where its really easy to do some basic metaprogramming to make your life easier, although they don’t get to the levels of Lisp-based languages like Clojure that take metaprogramming to eleven by taking advantage of their really simple syntax allowing you to actually do something like a hybrid between expanding your program’s capabilities and writing code for another program, you actually get to write and/or modify the source code of your own running program, be it just changing or expanding an existing function or even adding base syntax that didn’t exist before. I’ve also used it a lot at some workplaces I’ve been, where they mostly use it to write repetitive code based on a simpler version that the programmer actually writes, although I’ve also worked at a company that used metaprogramming to write code equivalent to what programmers usually write but in a language that allows it to run much faster, basically making a transpiler of sorts. I wouldn’t call it a complete transpiler as it couldn’t really convert any program, only a bunch of really specialized structures that were strictly defined so that it could work.