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Agreed. I have two follow up thoughts: 1. Badly designed functions can do less design damage per-function than badly designed languages per construct, but user

Agreed. I have two follow up thoughts: 1. Badly designed functions can do less design damage per-function than badly designed languages per construct, but user-defined functions tend to have much higher volume than both language constructs and their usages. 2. Powerful techniques, including DSLs, lead to denser code. Denser code takes more time to read per unit of code. Total reading time may be either more or less, but the cold start ramp is always much steeper. Combined, this means that people are less sensitive to suffering the complexity caused by user-defined functions vs DSLs/etc because that complexity has lower intensity spread out over a greater area. I'll refrain from any further value judgement on this state of affairs; just wanted to share some more insights in to the tradeoffs.

lisper 10y ago
> Badly designed functions can do less design damage per-function than badly designed languages per construct Really? When was the last time you successfully used a C library without reading the documentation?
- brandonbloom 10y ago
  Straw man. When was the last time you had to check the documentation for the parameter evaluation strategy of a C function call? I don't think it is a controversial statement than a badly designed macro can do more damage than a badly designed function. I believe that this is true, even normalizing for bad macro systems. This is not a statement against macros, so much as it is a statement to consider when making tradeoffs.
  - lisper 10y ago
    What would you cite as an example of a badly designed macro?
  - lisper 10y ago
    It is controversial. The GETS function is probably responsible for a huge number of security breaches with a cost possibly ranging into the billions of dollars (there's no way to really know). What would you cite as a comparable example of a badly designed macro?
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
      Part of the reason gets() has been such a disaster is that people use it.

lisper 10y ago

> Badly designed functions can do less design damage per-function than badly designed languages per construct Really? When was the last time you successfully used a C library without reading the documentation?

brandonbloom 10y ago
Straw man. When was the last time you had to check the documentation for the parameter evaluation strategy of a C function call? I don't think it is a controversial statement than a badly designed macro can do more damage than a badly designed function. I believe that this is true, even normalizing for bad macro systems. This is not a statement against macros, so much as it is a statement to consider when making tradeoffs.
- lisper 10y ago
  What would you cite as an example of a badly designed macro?
- lisper 10y ago
  It is controversial. The GETS function is probably responsible for a huge number of security breaches with a cost possibly ranging into the billions of dollars (there's no way to really know). What would you cite as a comparable example of a badly designed macro?
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    Part of the reason gets() has been such a disaster is that people use it.