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I couldn’t agree more. I almost want to call it the iceberg metric. If 90% of your complexity is hidden underwater it’s still there, you just don’t notice it un

I couldn’t agree more. I almost want to call it the iceberg metric. If 90% of your complexity is hidden underwater it’s still there, you just don’t notice it until your boat crashes into it.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
But this is also how civilization is built. We need that 90% to be underwater just to build the remaining 10%. Proper macros make that complexity much more accessible. That is, if things work correctly, you still don't notice, but if they don't, you get to easily fix them (though you still have to pay the cost of understanding it first). Macros can be seen as incidental tooling reduced to only essential complexity. For comparison, a typical JS transpilation toolchain seems more like 80% of incidental complexity.
- BigJono 8y ago
  I definitely agree with this. I think there's obviously a point where the complexity savings from using a macro outweigh the inherent disadvantages. But I'd also guess that a large percentage of the programmers using them wouldn't know where to draw that line, and probably don't spare a single thought on it. My point was more around instances where the supposed benefits of moving that logic to build time are superficial, which as you alluded to, is rife within the JS ecosystem. I hate to pick on Vue too much, because for the most part it's a pretty good tool, but in their docs they claim one of the motivations for building Vue and using it over React was that it's more familiar to people who have built traditional web apps, because it leverages more html/css knowledge rather than JS knowledge (it doesn't, other than in superficial ways, by the way. But that's a discussion for another day). This seems insane to me. Just as insane as if you used a ton of C or Lisp macros to make the language look like Python, just because your devs were used to Python. I feel like in those communities you'd get called out for adding a bunch of accidental complexity and told to suck it up and just learn C. But in JS land it's just par for the course.

I couldn’t agree more. I almost want to call it the iceberg metric. If 90% of your complexity is hidden underwater it’s still there, you just don’t notice it until your boat crashes into it.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

But this is also how civilization is built. We need that 90% to be underwater just to build the remaining 10%. Proper macros make that complexity much more accessible. That is, if things work correctly, you still don't notice, but if they don't, you get to easily fix them (though you still have to pay the cost of understanding it first). Macros can be seen as incidental tooling reduced to only essential complexity. For comparison, a typical JS transpilation toolchain seems more like 80% of incidental complexity.

BigJono 8y ago
I definitely agree with this. I think there's obviously a point where the complexity savings from using a macro outweigh the inherent disadvantages. But I'd also guess that a large percentage of the programmers using them wouldn't know where to draw that line, and probably don't spare a single thought on it. My point was more around instances where the supposed benefits of moving that logic to build time are superficial, which as you alluded to, is rife within the JS ecosystem. I hate to pick on Vue too much, because for the most part it's a pretty good tool, but in their docs they claim one of the motivations for building Vue and using it over React was that it's more familiar to people who have built traditional web apps, because it leverages more html/css knowledge rather than JS knowledge (it doesn't, other than in superficial ways, by the way. But that's a discussion for another day). This seems insane to me. Just as insane as if you used a ton of C or Lisp macros to make the language look like Python, just because your devs were used to Python. I feel like in those communities you'd get called out for adding a bunch of accidental complexity and told to suck it up and just learn C. But in JS land it's just par for the course.