2 ms·

> macros are good; using them is good; Unless your problem doesn't absolutely need them. It's considered bad style to use them when not absolutely necessary be

> macros are good; using them is good; Unless your problem doesn't absolutely need them. It's considered bad style to use them when not absolutely necessary because they are much harder to reason about. Macros can be dangerous in the 'give a man a hammer, everything looks like a nail' way. Like when some Python people went mental over meta classes using them everywhere they weren't needed. I love macros (in lisp) but you shouldn't need to use them that much. They aren't always good.

klibertp 13y ago
> I love macros (in lisp) but you shouldn't need to use them that much. They aren't always good. Isn't this true for almost everything? For example a while back there was this talk "Stop writing classes", where someone argued that you should just use functions for many simple cases (with nice examples etc). Generally you should abstract on the level most suitable to the problem at hand. Some problems are best (for some value of "best") abstracted with a global var, others with a set of functions, others yet with hierarchy of classes. Syntactic abstraction is just another tool in your toolbox and it is very handy sometimes; of course it's not fit for every problem. But no one is going to do a "Stop writing macros" talk anytime soon, just because no one is writing macros - most languages lack them completely or have only silly string-oriented preprocessors, and even in languages that support them macros are feared and avoided. I would just like to see macros go "mainstream" - if this means they'd be abused a bit (like classes/OOP now, for example) then I think I can live with it. Probably - it's quite possible I'd come to regret it very quickly :)