Metaphor is a software company that develops distributed reflective systems.
Our purpose will be to develop the ideas from the TUNES project, starting with the low-hanging fruits with the hope of reaping the profits to fund our longer-term goals.
Our long-term goal is to use reflection (internalization of the knowledge and expertise of computing semantics) to improve semantics-based unification between programming languages, and otherwise push ever higher the level of abstraction at which programming may happen.
The low-hanging fruits, we think, still lie in better automation in the development and management of distributed computing systems, particularly so as regard the building of systems consistently manipulating large bodies of evolving persistent data.
Our flagship product will be a database system that scales semi-automatically. Declarativeness, syntactic and semantic abstraction, will allow for faster development as well as easier management. Unlike existing "relational" or "object" databases, we will decouple the data model from the transaction model, allowing for enhanced robustness as well as unequalled flexibility in adapting the database to various application domains. Based on a relatively efficient dynamic higher-order typed language, and maintaining an explicit decoupling between monotonic (purely functional) and linear (stateful) fragments of our computational logic, we'll build a distributed system, a reliable multicast facility on top of which we can journal distributed transactions, that can be used to construct various queryable views of the data.
Our first version will extend PLT Scheme with Erlang-style concurrency. Controlling the system at the level of the programming language will provide total semantic control and enable metaprograms that aid with code-data co-evolution. Such metaprograms may include but not be limited to the following: domain-specific language compilers, program analyzers, proof checkers, constraint solvers, aspect weavers, aspect splitters, static and dynamic co-optimizers, compactors, instrumenters, automated debuggers, update generators, etc.
All the software we write will of course be Free Software, published under a dual license bugroff/MIT, and available on TUNES.org. You'll be welcome to use it, improve on it, and either give back to the community or hoard your improvements. But if you need the world best specialists to tailor our software to your needs, build robust and usable applications, and provide exceptional service, then you know where to find us.
The TUNES project will continue to pursue its existence as an independent non-profit organization. Our company is a separate for-profit entity that happens to contribute to the TUNES project. We are open to research, development or consulting contracts, with the understanding that our core software will be published as free software, although special-purpose customizations might remain an unpublished secret shared with our customers.
For more information, contact info@meta.ph.