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Comment by teh_klev | Hacker News Reader

Unless I'm building a framework, should I really care?

I'm a "mort" line of business apps dev (well not just that, I do lots of other things, but hey). Do I really need to care about metaprogramming, my gut instinct says no because our business and customer requirements change all the time, and unpredictably. And if I was spending time thinking about "meta programming", nothing would get done.

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I imagine if you spent most of your time worrying about language design in general, your "business apps dev" wouldn't be too successful. Some people look a little further than the meal on their own plate.

No offense, but I think your comment is a bit short-sighted. Meta-programming is just another tool in your tool-belt. It's not going to take you 6 months of practice to "get it".

I don't disagree with you, but some people might actually have problems 'understanding' metaprogramming; the same way some people have difficulties understanding pointers, or working through TAoCP/SICP/HTDP.

Problem is, once you get it; it's unfathomable that you might not understand it.

It's my experience, even in boring business code, that learning more techniques can significantly help. Common OO/procedural code has a ton of boilerplate that can be eliminated with functional and metaprogramming techniques, for instance.

But you're right, you don't need to learn anything. Facebook is doing well and it was written in PHP. I hear many popular books were written on typewriters, or even with pen and paper.

I would think of it as more code that generates code, or functions that get called at compile time rather than run time. I've had code that I copied and pasted, and changed, but couldn't factor out into a separate function easily. In those cases, a macro to write the code would have worked nicely.

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