51–60 of 140 posts
The only thing you would need to give up to drop them altogether is &key/opt/rest args.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've learned Clojure. Tried and failed to see this unique power of macros. Truly asking for help: can you help explain what can I do with macros that I cannot do with functions? Or, maybe, cannot do with high quality or low complexity using functions?
Here's a simple example you can't write in most languages. (first-working (get-it-from-the-cache) (get-it-from-the-database) (get-it-from-an-external-api) (compute-it-the-slow-way) default-value) Note each of those functions could throw an exception. You want to ignore it (or you could log it) and move on to the next.
firstWorking() ?? getItFromTheCache() ?? getItFromTheDataBase() ?? getItFromAnExternalApi() ?? computeItTheSlowWay() ?? defaultValue;
Perl OR short-circuit:
firstWorking() or getItFromTheCache() or getItFromTheDataBase() or getItFromAnExternalApi() or computeItTheSlowWay() or defaultValue;
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The existence of template metaprogramming is an argument for macros, not against them. It shows the lengths to which programmers will abuse and misuse a feature so that they can reach their goals.
When I first started writing asm code, it was accepted to write self-modifying code (programmatically create new code, then jmp to it.) Then I discovered and was told it was a bad idea. So that's how I view Lisp macros - creating code on the fly and executing it. When I was studying this issue, I came across femtolisp, which is a standalone Lisp by the author of Julia, Jeff Bezanson. Julia has metaprogramming so I wa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The existence of template metaprogramming is an argument for macros, not against them. It shows the lengths to which programmers will abuse and misuse a feature so that they can reach their goals.
When I first started writing asm code, it was accepted to write self-modifying code (programmatically create new code, then jmp to it.) Then I discovered and was told it was a bad idea. So that's how I view Lisp macros - creating code on the fly and executing it. When I was studying this issue, I came across femtolisp, which is a standalone Lisp by the author of Julia, Jeff Bezanson. Julia has metaprogramming so I wa…
What you describe is actually used in a lot of modern software, usually self-modifying code refers to code that modifies itself while running, typically in a loop, not just generating fresh code :)
I'm programming in Lisp (Chez Scheme) now. I've been a serious Lisp programmer (recreationally and sometimes professionally) for around 10 years and I have programmed in Common Lisp, Scheme, my own weird dialects, Emacs Lisp, etc. At this point I feel like almost everything written about Lisp is silly. Taken as a language family as a whole, there isn't much that separates Lisp from most of the other languages that ar…
"Most people should never use [macros]" is not a very good take-away. This is silly and overly paternalistic, like most programmers are children who shouldn't enjoy an extraordinarily expressive programming tool because it's "dangerous to readability". I feel as though people imagine more macro horror stories than they've actually ever experienced. I've experienced just one horror story in an optional-use open-source…
I think you're right about CL and CLojure, though. While I really prefer Scheme, its not really appropriate for solving a large set of practical problems.
A fun exercise when reading posts like those is to mentally compare to TCL. It is somewhat uglier - TCL's lists are multi-valued; and newlines are signficicant, introducing difference between "script" and "command". Still, the basic eval command looks remarkably similar in lisp vs TCL.
> TCL's lists are multi-valued Can you elaborate? I am not sure what you mean.
It sucks. Tcl will break you down.
Not original commenter, btw.
I want a language that has one and only one obvious way to do things. That doesn't require building my own language features or choosing an addon that might or might not be compatible with others.
I don't have any use for the flexibility to customize a language because I want a language that doesn't need to be customized.
If I was doing cutting edge AI i might feel differently, but I'm not. The stuff I do has only one place for creativity and that's the UI. The code should be boring and utterly forgettable. If someone remembers your code, it's probably because they had to spend time looking at it when they could have been writing unit tests or moving on to new features.
Maybe this is true for language hobbyists or whatever, but every few years throughout my career, I went back to LISP or LISP-like languages and never found it super profound. Do I need to spend more time on a project? I just don't get the same excitement others seem to get.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I follow that up with knowledge of a large project that was started in Lisp (actually Scheme) that had to be converted to C# because the difficulty of finding experienced Scheme developers for the years of maintenance that would be expected was far more than the cost of converting to a language that's more "usable." Still remember all the meetings that generally always included someone complaining "what the $#&^%! we…
I know a startup that hired a Marxist-collective group of programmers. I was told this story years ago, and they were acquired, so I’ll just name the firm - “White Ops”. This story is so absurd that I’m naming the firm in hopes someone can verify the accuracy of this, although I trust the person that told me the tale. The programmers were based in Canada and only wrote in Haskell. The CTO of White Ops had apparently…
There was a furry who worked as a web developer for a small firm. He had built their back-end runtime in MUCK scripting language. (A MUCK is like a MUD, but without the statistics and stuff, so it's much less a role-playing game than it is simply role-playing.) Eventually he was fired, probably because he spent more time pretending to be a highly sexualized female fox on MUCKs than doing his job, but the back end to all their web apps was written in MUCK code -- and few non-furries even knew what a MUCK was let alone how to program one. So the befuddled engineers who remained had to figure out how to modify the code without their vulpine-in-his-own-mind former colleague.
They uh, also didn't notice the backdoor he put into the web server that allowed him to spy on their activities, even though he was gone from the company...
A fun exercise when reading posts like those is to mentally compare to TCL. It is somewhat uglier - TCL's lists are multi-valued; and newlines are signficicant, introducing difference between "script" and "command". Still, the basic eval command looks remarkably similar in lisp vs TCL.
> TCL's lists are multi-valued Can you elaborate? I am not sure what you mean.
Compared to that, TCL's composite type is "list", which has an arbitrary number of elements, and recursive iteration is not as simple. Yes, one can use "lindex"/"lrange" to do LISP-style recursive iteration, but this is not idiomatic at all and has horrible performance. Instead, people use foreach/explicit numeric indices, and this needs more support and special iterating-related functions, see [0] for example.
[0] https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Map+in+functional+programming