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Well I think Lisp's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness: macros. By being able to bend a Lisp to your will, you trade your ability to standardize the
by urs2102 11y ago
Well I think Lisp's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness: macros.
By being able to bend a Lisp to your will, you trade your ability to standardize the language and build a community of libraries and tools around it. That being said, there's nothing like having a language which eventually becomes the best tool for solving the problem you're facing for at hand (as your Lisp will tend to evolve appropriately).
- lispm 11y agoPeople 'standardize' macros all the time. 1) Invent a new useful macro. 2) Package it as a library 3) Document it. 4) advertize it Since macros are written in a standard language and many cab be written in a portable way, it just another way of meta programming. Stuff like DEFCLASS, DEFMETHOD, ITERATE, WITH-GENSYMS, etc. started as portable libraries. What one has to learn: the language does not have a fixed amount of syntax. That's the price to pay: learning a new level of programming: linguistic meta programming.