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Interesting. I prefer the "programming as magick" metaphor, and would say I have a playful mood regarding programming, but I still like static typing. Having s

• nnq 14y ago
  ...anyone grows to love static typing sooner or later, after endless debugging sessions in dynamic language codebases :) But I think that higher-order functions don't belong to one extreme or the other - anyone uses them, even weekend-coders that do javascript or have been exposed to php 5.4's new features end up using them - they are something so basic that any language has it in one form or another, even C has function pointers. Macros, otoh are a very different creature: they may seem similar to higher order functions in Haskell where you can use hof for what you'd use macros in Lisp, but they are a whole different ball game because you can't reason (formally, or informally but within the "what is" mindview) about code that transforms/generates code (or you can, but it's just TOO HARD), and I guess this is why so many developers are afraid of them and language-designers omitted them or added them as an extra feature and not as core language defining features from day 0 (for example Scala - I bet the language would've been very different if macros would've been there since version 0.1, been more "usable", and used to build more core language features on top of them...).