Meta, a Human-Friendly Programming Language
Meta, a Human-Friendly Programming Language
From the site:
We have entered a world in which we need to do more with less. If you, like us, have frowned at the difficulty and inefficiency of creating software, and wondered if there is a better way, Meta is for you. It is a descendant of the acclaimed REBOL and Logo computer languages. Logo was designed in academia to teach programming in a simple yet powerful way. It is widely used in education and influenced many newer systems and languages. REBOL extended this concept to professional programming. It was invented by Carl Sassenrath, the chief software designer of the famous Amiga computer, the first consumer multimedia system. Meta takes the next step by combining this design with the virtues of the C programming language, which has been the standard for software interoperability and performance for half a century.
- Seems to be primarily inspired by REBOL but designed to be faster [1].
- Can compile to various 8-bit Atari machines and αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε (which means it can run on almost anything) [2].
- Has an official Bluesky account, which AFAIK is the main social media presence.
Awful naming. Forgetting the fortune 500 company you're already thinking of, there's already a Meta Lang, abbreviated to ML.
Besides that, does it have any 'meta' features? E.g. Homoiconicity?
Omg im gonna fuking rage if i see any more of these horrible names. Ever had to search for something, yeah?
Its impossible to find anything about a topic if your keyword is something like meta, signal, element, matrix, session, rust.
To be fully homoiconic, Meta needs to be able to manipulate its own code. Currently, that is done by REBOL 3. REBOL is homoiconic, and Meta is currently a REBOL 3 format. It will take a lot more to enable Meta to handle its own code, so that will take time. Even though REBOL and Red are homoiconic, they're not implemented in themselves. REBOL has a C interpreter and Red a Red/System interpreter. Meta is two to three orders of magnitude faster and designed to be able to implement itself eventually.
Meta is for people with an open mind who want to make an effort to improve. You also need to be able to handle the fact that Meta is a work in progress. It’s good, but not perfect. Everyone will find in our projects what they are looking for. If you come to them with a preconception that they can’t be any good, or that they should be the same as other products, your brain will trick you into interpreting everything we say negatively and you will imagine to have confirmed your preconceptions. Something can’t be an improvement or innovative without being different. On the other hand, if you are curious and of good will and make an effort to understand what we are saying, you will find a lot to enjoy and use. You must be willing to have your thinking changed by Meta.
We aim to transcend a narrow focus on a specific audience. Meta is a project for developers who need power from their language, but also for occasional programmers who don’t have the time to juggle many arcane details, and for people who want to learn programming and are looking for an easier language. It’s a project for REBOL fans, but we also welcome programmers from other languages who want to expand their horizon. It’s a project for Atari and Syllable enthusiasts, but also for all the other platforms. Meta is for fun and for profit. We don’t believe in fundamental contradictions between these uses, and we don’t want to create artificial limitations. We believe that, when embraced, these uses will reinforce each other.
We make this possible through Meta’s unique combination of properties. Its human-friendly focus and high-level properties reduce the cognitive load on your brain. This brings the language within reach of beginning and occasional programmers, but also frees advanced developers to spend their energy on their application logic, instead of babysitting the language.
Meta’s low-level properties and raw performance enable it to run on more diverse platforms than most other languages, and allow advanced developers to still babysit the language when they need to.
Now this does require some mutual understanding from everyone involved. We will build an inclusive community, where anyone with good intentions can feel welcome. The project materials will cater to all knowledge levels, so that people can grow through them.
Not everyone is willing to make the effort to learn to understand Meta and the principles it is based on. This is usually not because they are not capable of doing so, but because they are already used to other computer languages based on different principles. Some of them even fiercely resist the notion that Meta could be rational and useful, in spite of the more than half a century of scientific and practical history in related languages that are highly influential on many modern computer languages and systems. To understand why this happens, read these articles:
The Backfire Effect, by The Oatmeal
Theory of Bounded Rationality
The Blub Paradox
Meta is outside their bounds of rationality, leading them to rationalisations that are bizarre to those who do understand Meta. While this is unfortunate, it also shows that Meta is a real innovation that pushes these bounds, towards greater rationality. If you want to give it a positive spin, it is also a clear way to outcompete them. We need to focus on those for whom Meta is within their bounded rationality, so they can achieve the results that show others the progress.
An odd consequence of this is that Meta needs a two-pronged approach of focusing on both beginning and advanced programmers. Beginning programmers haven’t invested much yet in different languages, so they may as well try Meta. Advanced programmers have the insight to see that Meta solves several pervasive problems in programming, and the mental capacity to learn a different language. Of course, this also makes Meta suitable for medium-level programmers, but that is not in our hands: it depends on their mental agility. One can lead a horse to water, but one can’t make it drink.
If you find yourself in the middle group, and you do want to make an effort to learn Meta, but you can’t get your head around it, it is very useful to read the following essays. They are about Logo, Lisp and Scheme, but much the same fundamental principles apply to Meta. The second essay explains them in terms of different, popular programming and data languages such as XML, SQL, C and its preprocessor, C++, Java and C#:
High School Computing: The Inside Story
The Nature of Lisp
People think its a joke when we say us developers are terrible at naming things.
Theres this phenomenal automation app on android called "automate". Searching for anything marginally related is a PIA.
For anyone curious, FizzBuzz:
Meta [ Title: {Fizz Buzz math "game"} Author: "Kaj de Vos" Rights: "Copyright (c) 2021,2022 Kaj de Vos" License: { PD/CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ } Notes: { https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fizz_buzz https://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest https://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/FizzBuzz } ] For counter 100 [ ; Count to 100 Third?: unless modulo counter 3 [write "Fizz"] ; Display "Fizz" every third count; remember whether we did Any [ unless modulo counter 5 [write "Buzz"] ; Display "Buzz" every fifth count third? ; Remember earlier result write counter ; Display the number if not third or fifth ] Write " " ; Separate the displayed items ] Write new-line ; Return the text cursor to the start of the lineIt reads just like FiM++
I scrolled a lot before I gave up looking for an example. No thanks.
Permanently Deleted
Wdym, examples are linked in the post's description and in the site's header?
Honestly, agreed. This reads more like a manifesto than a useful language introduction.
REBOL is one of my biggest blind spots in programming language familiarity. I remember there was another REBOL revival project called RED, which always boasted huge feature sets with small amounts of code, though I never got around to investigating those claims myself.
This project seems to aim to provide strong foundations for a more performant compiler, but still lacks the most powerful REBOL features. I wonder if anyone can summarise those features? In particular, is there anything fundamental that distinguishes REBOL from Lisp, Smalltalk, Ruby, etc?
Also to be fully homoiconic, Meta needs to be able to manipulate its own code. Currently, that is done by REBOL 3. REBOL is homoiconic, and Meta is currently a REBOL 3 format. It will take a lot more to enable Meta to handle its own code, so that will take time. Even though REBOL and Red are homoiconic, they're not implemented in themselves. REBOL has a C interpreter and Red a Red/System interpreter. Meta is two to three orders of magnitude faster and designed to be able to implement itself eventually.
Red/REBOL are a data format first. Many native data types. Lisp uses Fexpr and Red use a basic token. Each character!
Originally Posted on Hacker News by 9214
Red (and Rebol) are based on research in denotational semantics that Carl Sassenrath did. I'll try to briefly explain the main points.
Everything starts with a UTF-8 encoded string. Each valid token in this string is converted to an internal data representation - a boxed structure 4 machine pointers in size, called a value slot or sometimes a cell.
Value slot is composed of a header and a payload. Header contains various flags and datatype ID, payload specifies exact content of the value. If content doesn't fit in one value slot, then payload contains a pointer to an external buffer (an array of value slots, bytes, or other units + offset and start/end addresses IIRC) with extra data.
So, lexer converts string representation to a tree of value slots (this phase is called loading), which is essentially a concrete syntax tree (CST) — this is the crux of homoiconicity.
https://github.com/red/red/wiki/[DOC]-How-Red-works,-a-brief-explanation
https://github.com/red/red/wiki/[DOC]-Guru-Meditations#contexts-and-binding
https://github.com/red/red/wiki/[DOC]-Function-Evaluation
Who cares if creators cant name things great. Forget names lets use and improve technology.
Awesome! Much better layout than the other post made ;) Thanks for the assist.
Meta is for people with an open mind who want to make an effort to improve. You also need to be able to handle the fact that Meta is a work in progress. It's good, but not perfect. Everyone will find in our projects what they are looking for. If you come to them with a preconception that they can't be any good, or that they should be the same as other products, your brain will trick you into interpreting everything we say negatively and you will imagine to have confirmed your preconceptions. Something can't be an improvement or innovative without being different. On the other hand, if you are curious and of good will and make an effort to understand what we are saying, you will find a lot to enjoy and use. You must be willing to have your thinking changed by Meta.
We aim to transcend a narrow focus on a specific audience. Meta is a project for developers who need power from their language, but also for occasional programmers who don't have the time to juggle many arcane details, and for people who want to learn programming and are looking for an easier language. It's a project for REBOL fans, but we also welcome programmers from other languages who want to expand their horizon. It's a project for Atari and Syllable enthusiasts, but also for all the other platforms. Meta is for fun and for profit. We don't believe in fundamental contradictions between these uses, and we don't want to create artificial limitations. We believe that, when embraced, these uses will reinforce each other.
We make this possible through Meta's unique combination of properties. Its human-friendly focus and high-level properties reduce the cognitive load on your brain. This brings the language within reach of beginning and occasional programmers, but also frees advanced developers to spend their energy on their application logic, instead of babysitting the language.
Meta's low-level properties and raw performance enable it to run on more diverse platforms than most other languages, and allow advanced developers to still babysit the language when they need to.
Now this does require some mutual understanding from everyone involved. We will build an inclusive community, where anyone with good intentions can feel welcome. The project materials will cater to all knowledge levels, so that people can grow through them.
Not everyone is willing to make the effort to learn to understand Meta and the principles it is based on. This is usually not because they are not capable of doing so, but because they are already used to other computer languages based on different principles. Some of them even fiercely resist the notion that Meta could be rational and useful, in spite of the more than half a century of scientific and practical history in related languages that are highly influential on many modern computer languages and systems. To understand why this happens, read these articles:
The Backfire Effect, by The Oatmeal Theory of Bounded Rationality The Blub ParadoxMeta is outside their bounds of rationality, leading them to rationalisations that are bizarre to those who do understand Meta. While this is unfortunate, it also shows that Meta is a real innovation that pushes these bounds, towards greater rationality. If you want to give it a positive spin, it is also a clear way to outcompete them. We need to focus on those for whom Meta is within their bounded rationality, so they can achieve the results that show others the progress.
An odd consequence of this is that Meta needs a two-pronged approach of focusing on both beginning and advanced programmers. Beginning programmers haven't invested much yet in different languages, so they may as well try Meta. Advanced programmers have the insight to see that Meta solves several pervasive problems in programming, and the mental capacity to learn a different language. Of course, this also makes Meta suitable for medium-level programmers, but that is not in our hands: it depends on their mental agility. One can lead a horse to water, but one can't make it drink.
If you find yourself in the middle group, and you do want to make an effort to learn Meta, but you can't get your head around it, it is very useful to read the following essays. They are about Logo, Lisp and Scheme, but much the same fundamental principles apply to Meta. The second essay explains them in terms of different, popular programming and data languages such as XML, SQL, C and its preprocessor, C++, Java and C#:
High School Computing: The Inside Story The Nature of LispFor anyone curious, FizzBuzz:
Meta [ Title: {Fizz Buzz math "game"} Author: "Kaj de Vos" Rights: "Copyright (c) 2021,2022 Kaj de Vos" License: { PD/CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ } Notes: { https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fizz_buzz https://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest https://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/FizzBuzz } ]
For counter 100 [ ; Count to 100 Third?: unless modulo counter 3 [write "Fizz"] ; Display "Fizz" every third count; remember whether we did
Any [ unless modulo counter 5 [write "Buzz"] ; Display "Buzz" every fifth count third? ; Remember earlier result write counter ; Display the number if not third or fifth ] Write " " ; Separate the displayed items] Write new-line ; Return the text cursor to the start of the line