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Yeah, but there's always a cultural struggle to prevent everyone from using their own incomprehensible DSL. See "The Lisp Curse" [1]. Even vanilla Haskell (with

Yeah, but there's always a cultural struggle to prevent everyone from using their own incomprehensible DSL. See "The Lisp Curse" [1]. Even vanilla Haskell (without macros, i.e. without Template Haskell) takes it too far by allowing to define arbitrary custom operators with arbirtary associativity and precedence. Many Haskell libraries are an incomprehensible soup of symbols instead of regular functions with readable names. Rust does pretty well so far. Macros are used appropriately in the ecosystem. [1] http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

kazinator 2y ago
The Lisp Curse was written by someone who never worked on a Lisp project, let alone with other people. It's a good example of what hallucination looked like before AI took it over. Macros are super helpful in communicating ideas to future maintainers. The alternative to writing a macro and using it seventeen times is to just open code some similar logic in seventeen places. The macro calls can all be found by name, and if something is wrong, it can be fixed in one place: the macro definition. Macros run in your development system, and so do not have to be debugged in the live target. Most macris are functional and have only one input: the unexpanded macro call. They can be debugged simply by inspecting the output, and iterating on it.