An Introduction to Metaprogramming

Hi, today's entry is going to talk about an article called “An Introduction to Metaprogramming” written by our professor Ariel Ortiz in 2007. First of all, I just want to mention that I’m really impressed because I didn’t know that our professor had many published articles and papers (we saw the others in my other blog for Compilers Design course). Basically, as its name says, it talks about metaprogramming, which is defined during the article as a program that generates other programs or just program parts. It is used to eliminate or just reduce a “tedious” programming task. It is like instead of writing complex machine code programs, we use any high-level language and use the compiler of that language to do the translation into the programs equivalent in machine code (low-level language). I have to admit that before reading this paper, I hadn’t fully understood the metaprogramming meaning and importance. We used and applied that term in a past course called Programming Languages. On that course, we built a metacircular program using Clojure.

I want to mention two concepts I found important, the eval function and Quines. The first one is a function that not all the languages have, but it is used to translate and execute any piece of code in a string but at the runtime phase. This could really facilitate the development of a metacircular program because, in that way, we don`t have to generate a new file and then run it. The second one refers to a kind of source code generator, very useful also for building any metacircular program.

I found this paper really interesting an effectively achieving its main goal, that it is giving an introduction to metacircular programming. It gave us some techniques to facilitate our metaprogramming both understating and developing. I hope more papers as this one are coming.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hidden Figures

Hi­, today’s entry is going to be about the second movie we watched on this course. This time I’m talking about “Hidden Figures”, an American movie that tells the story of three African-American women that worked for the NASA during the famous space race to first reach the space and safely come back between the USSR and the United States. Those three women are Dorothy, Mary and Katherine, and they were key during the launch of those first betas and successfully trips to space. First of all, as these women were very important employees inside NASA and that had a meaningful contribution to this space race, the fact that I hadn’t heard about them before really surprised me. In those times they were suffering two types of discrimination at the same time, being a woman and being Afro-American. I really liked how they manage to show how key they were in that project to gain respect and equality inside NASA. I think the main message of this movie is to demonstrate the importance of K
Read more

Microservices

Hi, today’s entry is going to talk about an article written by James Lewis and Martin Fowler called “Microservices” in 2014. Basically, by calling microservices, they are referring to like a particular way of designing software applications as suites of independently deployable services. But something interesting is that there is not a precise definition of that type of architectural style, there are only common characteristics around distinct organizations, business capability, automated deployment, intelligence in endpoints and also decentralized control of languages and data. This was the first time I heard this term, and something strange is that despite I didn’t notice about its existence I’d used them sometimes. Later in the articles, the authors gave us some characteristics that any Microservice Architecture must have. They are the following: 1.       Componentization via Services:  This is telling us that by building software, we put together components. So, this archite
Read more