Help support Wordnik by adopting your favorite word!


from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

  • n. A thinking pattern which determines what information a person takes note of and what information they screen out.
  • n. A computer program that writes or manipulates other programs as data, or does the work at runtime that would otherwise be done at compile time.


Sorry, no etymologies found.


  • As we are running a program that uses an API to generate code, rather than just reading a static description of the code to generate from a file, we can metaprogram, building reusable code-generation tools in the interpreted language so the programmer is not forced to deal with the low-level virtual machine.

    Snell-Pym » HYDROGEN: Code generation

  • Memory management is a small part of the picture, but the real gains in these more dynamic languages come from different areas, particularly from a flexible type model and from the ability to metaprogram. The Pragmatic Programmers Interview

