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Message: [QUOTE="Erann Gat, post: 1730411"] FWIW, IMO "designing your own private divergent language" is not an unalloyed good, but having the *ability* to design your own private divergent language quickly and easily is. Also, the "private divergent languages" that most people design using Lisp macros are supersets of Lisp, so that limits the extent to which divergence happens in practice. Your position against macros and in favor of HOFs strikes me as being very similar to those who want to ban model rocketry on the grounds that it is too dangerous. Yes, macros (and model rockets) can be dangerous. If you're not careful you can put your eye out with them. But if you are careful you can do very cool things with them and -- almost as important -- learn a lot in the process. (And what you learn from Lisp and model rocketry are deep truths about the world, not a bunch of random kabuki juju like what you fill your brain with when you learn C++.) This mindset, that anything that is potentially dangerous ought to be avoided because it is potentially dangerous, is IMHO a perverse impediment to progress. There is no reward without risk. Life is short. It's not hard to produce a reasonable estimate of the total number of keystrokes that you will be able to execute in a lifetime, and it's a pretty small number in the grand and glorious scheme of things. If you have no ambitions beyond writing yet-another-standard-web-app then macros are not for you. But if your goals run grander than that then the extra leverage that you get from things like macros becomes very precious indeed. Once your ambitions pass a certain point the only option open to you is to teach your computer to write code for you, because you don't have time to do it yourself. For example, there is no reason it should take multiple work years to write an operating system. There is no fundamental reason why one could not build a computational infrastructure that would allow a single person to write an operating system from scratch in a matter of days, maybe even hours or minutes. But such a system is going to have to have a fairly deep understanding of the relationship of code to hardware. You may want to write things like: (define-hardware-type ethernet-controller ...) or (define-hardware-standards-hierarchy (networking (ethernet (standard-ethernet (NE2000 ....)) (fast-ethernet ...) (gigabit-ethernet ...)) (fddi ...) (fibre-channel ...) ...) (mass-storage (hard-drive (ide ...) (scsi ...)) or (is-a ne2000 standard-ethernet-card) or (define-register-layout ...) God only knows. Only one thing is certain: with macros and readtables you will be limited only by your imagination. With anything less you will be limited by something else. E. [/QUOTE]

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