Foreword

When I think about metaprogramming I view it through three sets of experience: as a computer scientist, a business developer, and a .NET framework author.

From a computer science perspective, it is clear that our industry has been largely stagnant from a language perspective for an extremely long time. The slow evolution of 3GLs (third-generation languages) from C to C++ to Java to C# has resulted in incremental improvements, but no major leaps in terms of developer productivity, maintainability of code, reduction of complexity, or other meaningful metrics.

(I chose the C language progression in my example because it is perhaps the most widely known. Comparable progressions exist for BASIC, Pascal, and many other language families.)

Metaprogramming offers interesting possibilities around the creation of domain-specific languages and other abstraction concepts that could eventually break us out of the 3GL world we’ve lived in for the past 20-30 years. Although this book doesn’t focus on such a long-term goal, I think you can use Metaprogramming in .NET as a starting point to gain valuable perspective on myriad core ideas that might inspire you to think more about the future of our industry.