---
title: "The Meta Programming System - The next paradigm?"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/11/21/the-meta-programming-system-the-next-paradigm.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/11/21/the-meta-programming-system-the-next-paradigm.html"
published: "2004-11-21T22:19:00"
updated: "2004-11-21T22:19:00"
tags: ["Cool Articles"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "I don't even know where to begin after reading this very thought provoking article by Sergey Dmitriev , one of the fathers of IntelliJ IDEA (one of my favorite IDEs). The article talks about the \"Meta Programming…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# The Meta Programming System - The next paradigm?

By Roy Osherove November 21, 2004 In [Cool Articles](https://osherove.com/blog/category/cool-articles)

**Historical article** · Originally published November 21, 2004; technical details may be outdated.

I don't even know where to begin after reading this [very thought provoking article by Sergey Dmitriev](http://www.onboard.jetbrains.com/articles/04/10/lop/), one of the fathers of IntelliJ IDEA (one of my favorite IDEs). The article talks about the "Meta Programming System" which I would describe to you but [Martin fowler references his article](http://martinfowler.com/bliki/MetaProgrammingSystem.html) much better that I ever could:

"_\[Sergey\]_ _recently published an_ [_article_](http://www.onboard.jetbrains.com/articles/04/10/lop/) _on some exploratory development he's done called the Meta Programming System. He sees this system as an example of a broader movement which he calls Language Oriented Programming._

_My colleague Matt Foemmel and I spent some time with him last week and were very impressed with what we saw. I'm very interested in this growing movement, one that looks to build software through closely integrated sets of_ [_DomainSpecificLanguage_](http://martinfowler.com/bliki/DomainSpecificLanguage.html)_s. There's other interesting players in this space - most notably Intentional Programming and Microsoft's Whitehorse work. It's an area to keep your eye on over the next few years._ "

Lots of food for thought in the article, and there's actually a Java Plugin available as prototype. I wonder how long it would take to develop such a thing in .Net. Perhaps it's a great thing to try out using the new [DSL tool](http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/teamsystem/workshop/dsltools/) MS released a little while ago, huh?

## More in Cool Articles

[All posts in Cool Articles](https://osherove.com/blog/category/cool-articles)

- Jan 13, 2005

    ### [SQL Injection Attacks by Example](https://osherove.com/blog/2005/1/13/sql-injection-attacks-by-example.html)

- Dec 29, 2004

    ### [Comparing C++ unit testing frameworks](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/12/29/comparing-c-unit-testing-frameworks.html)

- Nov 12, 2004

    ### [Article: Continuous Database Integration by Peter Hancock](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/11/12/article-continuous-database-integration-by-peter-hancock.html)

- Nov 7, 2004

    ### [Mitigating malicious plug-ins in your application](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/11/7/mitigating-malicious-plug-ins-in-your-application.html)


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

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### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/