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> Every time you pass a "naked" lambda somewhere, you're potentially missing the opportunity to have a macro there do that for you. True but equally sad that y

> Every time you pass a "naked" lambda somewhere, you're potentially missing the opportunity to have a macro there do that for you. True but equally sad that you must use Lisp to hide ugly Lisp because naked lambda's are so ugly. Yet the point remains, whether hidden behind a macro or not, design patterns still exist in Lisp and every other language and always will.

kazinator 9y ago
Lambdas aren't "ugly"; they are sometimes just a mechanism that is not directly relevant to the problem domain: the "how" part of the solution, rather than "what". The point isn't to hide the lambdas, but to hide the "how", which might or might not use lambdas. The "how" could instead open-code the procedure that would have otherwise called the lambdas; then the material just becomes embedded forms in the inline code.
- gnaritas 9y ago
  Lets not kid ourselves, hiding lambda's is one of the primary uses of macros in Lisp (obviously not the only). Yes, you're hiding the "how", we don't disagree there, but my point was that such syntactic abstraction is only necessary in Lisp because it's so ugly to directly use lambda. Compare to Smalltalk which uses naked lambda's everywhere because they're nice looking as is and don't need to be hidden away by special forms in order to feel idiomatic.
  - kbp 9y ago
    > Lets not kid ourselves, hiding lambda's is one of the primary uses of macros in Lisp (obviously not the only). Yes, you're hiding the "how", we don't disagree there, but my point was that such syntactic abstraction is only necessary in Lisp because it's so ugly to directly use lambda. Compare to Smalltalk which uses naked lambda's everywhere because they're nice looking as is and don't need to be hidden away by special forms in order to feel idiomatic. Hiding lambdas with macros isn't really that common in my experience. The "how" being hidden is much more often (ultimately) IF, LET, BLOCK, and GO. Of course, higher order functions could often be used instead, but they're generally not.

kazinator 9y ago

Lambdas aren't "ugly"; they are sometimes just a mechanism that is not directly relevant to the problem domain: the "how" part of the solution, rather than "what". The point isn't to hide the lambdas, but to hide the "how", which might or might not use lambdas. The "how" could instead open-code the procedure that would have otherwise called the lambdas; then the material just becomes embedded forms in the inline code.

gnaritas 9y ago
Lets not kid ourselves, hiding lambda's is one of the primary uses of macros in Lisp (obviously not the only). Yes, you're hiding the "how", we don't disagree there, but my point was that such syntactic abstraction is only necessary in Lisp because it's so ugly to directly use lambda. Compare to Smalltalk which uses naked lambda's everywhere because they're nice looking as is and don't need to be hidden away by special forms in order to feel idiomatic.
- kbp 9y ago
  > Lets not kid ourselves, hiding lambda's is one of the primary uses of macros in Lisp (obviously not the only). Yes, you're hiding the "how", we don't disagree there, but my point was that such syntactic abstraction is only necessary in Lisp because it's so ugly to directly use lambda. Compare to Smalltalk which uses naked lambda's everywhere because they're nice looking as is and don't need to be hidden away by special forms in order to feel idiomatic. Hiding lambdas with macros isn't really that common in my experience. The "how" being hidden is much more often (ultimately) IF, LET, BLOCK, and GO. Of course, higher order functions could often be used instead, but they're generally not.