Metadata in Action
The thing that programmers spend the most time doing today is jiggering and adapting code for the purposes of integration: moving from format to format, from place to place, from API to API, or from operating system to operating system. Programming was once largely about algorithms and clever performance tricks, but in today’s connected world in which programs are built by combining third-party components, it is much more about mapping, copying, integrating, and communicating intelligibly.
Rich, runtime-available metadata makes it possible to do such operations automatically, by “rule.” On the surface, this would seem to be a statement about programmer productivity, but it is actually deeper, since metadata standards enable meaningful communications in an extensible way. By providing standard ways to refer to types and behaviors across processor types and across time (i.e., across versions), the CLI enables stable interoperability, and once stable interoperability is available, large component ecosystems can and will form.
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