2 ms·

I like this but it seems like there would be many inconsistencies to building your own language without an actual language specification

• reikonomusha 4y ago
  So, as a designer of miniature languages and syntactic extensions, specify it! A well written function must also abide by some promise or specification—contracts on the inputs and invariants on the outputs. I don't see why new syntactic structures are much different from that. I think there's undue spookiness around macros among lots of programmers, especially those who haven't sought to solve some problem with them. - "It's too powerful for the common person." - "It's way too likely to make code confusing." - "It's invariably too hard to reason about." - "It won't work on a team because everybody is going to make their own weird incompatible language and it's just not scalable." All of these sentiments are complete bunk, and I argue are against common wisdom around other programming abstractions, like functions or classes.