4 ms·

Why is no metaprogramming a good thing? I'm mostly a web dev but I've played with crystal quite a bit. Crystal embraces macros & metaprogramming. Its almost a l

• jonahx 6y ago
  As a ruby developer who went through a stage of being enamored with meta-programming, I'd argue that it's siren song: enticing, but dangerous and destructive. It's especially dangerous because it's fun to write -- it scratches the "I'm so clever" itch -- but is a disaster to read, and a disaster to maintain. Aside from just wanting to be creative, the desire to do it usually indicates either a missing core language feature, or a programmer's missing knowledge of how to use core features effectively and idiomatically. Otherwise you'd use the simple core language feature (the one every developer is guaranteed to know how to use already) to achieve your goal. The other reason it's sometimes used is prioritizing terseness over simplicity. That is, you introduce some meta-programming abstraction that saves you some LOC, but at the cost of abstraction overhead. Almost always, you're better off with the reverse priorities.
• iFreilicht 6y ago
  Because what zig does is much more intuitive: it has a comptime keyword that allows you to execute almost any function at compile time. So you use the same language for programming and metaprogramming, there’s no weird second syntax to learn. Even better, they also use that approach for generics, where types are just comptime parameters. Again, makes the syntax more consistent and requires less different ways of thinking.