Differences between meta-programming and intentional programming

In an effort to post something to this blog, here are some current thoughts:


After some reflection I have decided that meta-programming and intentional programming are two very different things.

Meta-programming is just about using/creating custom programming languages. The only intent meta-programming provides is just that which occurs due to the domain specificity of the languages in use. The actual code generated is still very mundane. Nothing special here.

Intentional programming to me means doing much more than just this. To me it is about leveraging the intent as much as is possible. Part of getting the intent is raising the level, and meta-programming is a great way to do this. But intentional programming can be some much more than writing software at different levels.

If intent has been encoded in such a way that we can leverage it, then the possibilities are huge.
For Example:
When about to perform a lower level db query we can, at this point in time, look and see what the higher level intent(s) is. Is the intent to just display this data on the UI? Is the intent to do X with the data?

We seem to have got into this rut of having very low expectations of what we can do, creating static code that's very dumb that doesn't know much. And them doing a huge amount of work to make up for all these deficiencies.

When we (the developer) write the code we are taking into consideration the intent and the implementation of many many layers. But what we create is this code that doesn't know the big picture, and couldn't but help be brittle and prone to errors. Heck a person given three parameters and an algorithm in isolation couldn't do much better either.