If you go to dictionary.com or some other fancy site, they’re liable to tell you that meta comes from Greek and means ‘beside’, or something like that.
If you surf the web you’ll generally gather the impression that attaching meta to a word applies that word to itself: metadata refers to data about data, metadiscussion refers to discussing discussion, metadesign means designing your design process, metaprogramming refers not to programming a computer, but programming a program.
These are all sneaky weasel definitions which obscure the true meaning of the word. The true meaning of the prefix “meta” is “not the real work”.
That this is the true definition of the word is pretty obvious – just think about the kind of people who care about “meta” issues (aka. metapeople, or “not real people who do real work”). They’re obviously not real people – for example the greatest example of a metaprogrammer ( not a real programmer) is a Lisp programmer, aka… not a real programmmer.
The hallmark of a ‘meta’ person is that all they do is sit around dwelling on how great ‘meta’ is (meta-tate, or meta-meta-tate, when they reflect on their own lives). If you’ve ever encountered a metaperson, chances are they spent all of the encounter trying to get you to abandon your current, productive task and to adopt a ‘meta’ approach. (Note that changing your habits so they approach a ‘meta’ approach is to metaapproach)
Metapeople will fanatically deny that they are unproductive. They will say that metaapproaching means that the real work will do itself with just a single push of a button, once you’re done. Metapeople even *appear* productive, but this is only because they’ve trapped themselves in a recursive cycle of metaapproaching. They are busy – busying themselves. They’re metabusying – or you could say that they’re busy metabusying, or metametabusying. Need I go further?
Take code generation, for example. Let’s say you’re trying to write a “Hello World” program in bash. You have just finished typing ‘echo’ and are about to enter in “Hello World” when a metaperson accosts you and says that your solution to the problem is far too specific and can’t be used to solve similar problems such as “Hi World” or “Hello Wurld”.
They suggest you write a program which generates programs which are similar to “Hello World”. No sooner do you sit down to hack some code when they reflect that the generator that you have in mind is really quite specific for a code generator, and that maybe you’d be better suited with a generator that could generate *more* kinds of programs than just “Hello World” variants.
So you start to bolt some features on to your generator, and they begin to complain that your spaghetti code is giving them migranes, and that you might as well just write a flexible generator to generate various kinds of generators. After all, you can’t put a price on elegance.
Eventually you’ll hit the natural limit of your hard drive. The first 125GB will be meta^99code, and the second 125GB will be the XML configuration files for the first 125GB.
You won’t have room for the string “Hello World”