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> Better? I can empathize with your enthusiasm that you can improve the situation a little on the surface, which feels like an achievement, but frankly, I thin
by jstimpfle 7y ago
> Better?
I can empathize with your enthusiasm that you can improve the situation a little on the surface, which feels like an achievement, but frankly, I think the code still sucks a lot... There's no way I could sustain writing the kind of code I like to write in this fashion.
From an engineering standpoint, using this was probably a poor choice (again, think error messages, tooling, mindshare...)
The metaprogramming code looks ugly and brittle to me, although I'm not in a position to judge.
- lisper 7y ago> I think the code still sucks a lot.. Why? How would you want it to be different?
- jstimpfle 7y agoI've already written so much and don't want to repeat myself anymore. Certainly the use of a macro that transforms basically all of the code must be one of the biggest problems, because it makes communication between compiler and programmer extremely hard (tooling, error messages, ...). Besides that, there is still considerable overhead compared to the C version (which was written once here, never changed, and is still effortlessly the clearest version), and I miss some punctuation (not just parens) to be able to make sure everything is closed correctly, indented correctly, etc. Having to manually space out variables and types as pairs is also bad ergonomics. And I miss some operators (assignment, subscripting, distinct function call syntax) that give visual cues that allow the skimmer to quickly find what happens in a function. Fun story: Larry Wall once said, Lisp looks like oatmeal with finger clippings mixed in. I can't disagree, and it's a serious problem for ergonomics.