So Rhine, being a Lisp, may not be a good language for implementing a big pure function involving a lot of tree transformations. Is that what I'm reading?
If your goal is to write a language that is very good for writing compilers, then bootstrapping is probably a great idea. If you have other goals, such as being well suited to CRUD applications, concurrency, parallelism, graphics, you may find that bootstrapping is not the most productive activity.
More broadly, if your goal is to produce a useful language, why would bootstrapping help you achieve that goal, beyond writing any other system in your language?
I certainly can imagine that tradeoff happening, in the abstract at least.
Was there a language/compiler combination that you worked on where you experienced this pitfall first hand, are there historical anecdotes from language/compiler authors, or did you arrive at this a priori?
ML? I believe the genesis of 'Meta Language' and 'Standard Meta Language' was language design being done by people who wrote nothing but experimental compilers. Not sure how often they were bootstrapping, but it would be a similar issue.
Solarsail -- not true. For one example, BNF is a meta-language (a language about language), and it is extremely useful in the real world.
As the author of a computer language expert system, I refer to its rules language as a meta-language (and rules as meta-code) because it manipulates language content symbolically. And, as it happens, it actually executes BNF in order to parse the languages it consumes, the BNF being delivered to it via that same rules language.
Code content represented in my system's Internal Representation (IR) is not itself a meta-language; it's more of a "super-language", being synthesized across real languages. But that IR's architecture does comprise a kind of meta-language; because it is a structure that represents language content in an abstracted way, it is "about" the very concept of a computer language.
As the author of such a system, I do meta every day, meta-meta often, and triple-meta occasionally.
Sounds like an interesting project. I didn't point ML to say that meta-languages generally or ML itself were useless. Rather, that ML is specialized in a way that wouldn't aid in writing things completely unrelated to compilers. (Tho I hadn't thought of using one in an expert system.) Say, writing relational databases, game AI's or GUI interfaces.
