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.
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.
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.
Fukin rage somewhere else. What is it with anger and programming? What in the flying hell is up with most of you keyboard junkies?
Way to admit that you have never done anything productive with a computer in your life.
This is a post about programming in a community about programming. Anybody that ever did any programming, knows how important searchability is.
That makes no sense. Wth is up with all y’alls biased minds? LOL I admit I never done anything productive in my life. Are you feeling better that I agree with your so keen wise insight on my life’s work, history and activities? Interesting skill you have. You are wasting it replying to me. You could be making $$$ helping companies with that mighty skill of keen life reading ability. Very impressive!
PS: If programmers can’t find shit and complain then unlabel yourself as one. I never claimed to be one anyways smartalec.
While we have opened up community creation for users, please refrain from misusing the feature.
Also, as specified in our code of conduct, try to avoid personal attacks. @Lmaydev@programming.dev
This comment really doesn’t make sense.
They explained the issue. Using a generic name makes it difficult to get good search results.
It’s a pain in the ass that almost all developers will have faced.
It’s extremely ironic how this comment displays the most anger in the entire post
Your insight is so flawed lol 🧌
Eventually it will have it.
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 lineI find that very hard to read.
Complexity Bias. I had it too. Withers away with time.
What I am not seeing is how it is much different than other languages. But hey, they had me at Atari!
It’s not so bad in a proper editor. These are very long lines and wrapping makes it worse than it is.
It reads just like FiM++
I scrolled a lot before I gave up looking for an example. No thanks.
Honestly, agreed. This reads more like a manifesto than a useful language introduction.
Awesome! Much better layout than the other post made ;) Thanks for the assist. Oh and https://matrix.to/#/#meta:gitter.im
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.
