"Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material."
– Alan Kay
Any program, regardless of the language used, contains two entities: data and instructions that manipulate the data. The usual flow of a program is mostly concerned with manipulating data. The issue with instructions, though, is that once you write them, it's like they've been carved into stone, and so they are non-malleable. It would be more enabling if we could treat instructions as data and generate new instructions using code. Metaprogramming provides exactly that!
It's a programming technique where you can write code that has the ability to generate new code. Depending on the language, it can be approached in two ways: at runtime or at compile time. ...
