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kerkeslagerHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

> I feel I should say that you shouldn't form too much of an opinion about Janet just because one …

> I feel I should say that you shouldn't form too much of an opinion about Janet just because one person used it to prototype a weird macro system. This concept is not, like, part of Janet or anything -- Janet macros are basically Common Lisp's, but with an elegant solution to the function hygiene problem -- and I don't think that I'm even a very representative Janet user (as a big macro fan). Janet is a very nice Lua and Perl alternative even if you never use it to write a single macro! Its text parsing facilities alone are worth a look. Sure, the alternative to hygenic macros was what originally made me curious about that, but now I've learned enough about that to satisfy my interest. However, I'll retract my statement that I'm not going to look into it further, because I had forgotten I was also interested in how they get it to embed in C programs. > Of course! But I feel like this doesn't make a compelling point against macros to me, because you could say exactly the same thing about first-class functions, or generic types, or any other language feature. And people have! …

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IA
ianthehenryHN

I think you're making very reasonable points in this thread :) > This post persuaded me to not take much of a look at Janet. I feel I should say that you shouldn't form too much of an opinion about Janet just because one person used it to prototype a weird macro system. This concept is not, like, part of Janet or anything -- Janet macros are basically Common Lisp's, but with an elegant solution to the function hygiene problem -- and I don't think that I'm even a very representative Janet user (as a big macro fan). Janet is a very nice Lua and Perl alternative even if you never use it to write a single macro! Its text parsing facilities alone are worth a look. > The problem Lisp macros solve is "this code is more verbose/ugly/boilerplate-y/etc. than I want it to be", which just isn't the problem you're writing the program to solve. I think this misses what I see as "the point" of macros, …

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IA
ianthehenryHN

> Right, but the complete argument isn't "there are other ways to do this", the argument is "there are other ways to do this, and nearly every one of them is less error-prone". I feel like there's such a wide variety of things that you could be trying to do with macros that this definitely true a lot of the time. > The same is true for popular libraries and whatnot that ship with the language, which is why I'm not particularly concerned about "defn" or "for" are macros. Those are macros in most implementations, I'm aware, but they're really-well-tested macros because pretty much every Lisp developer to ever write a significant amount of Lisp has tested them. "defn" and "for" aren't broken. So I'd argue for this differently: defn and for and other pervasive macros aren't safe because they're well-tested, they're safe because they're trivial . You know that (defn ...) is short for (def (fn…

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lispmHN

> the expressions I pass into Bob's functions only get executed once Sure not in functional programming languages, where one can pass functions or data structures which store functions. The code passed gets executed an arbitrary number of times and in different contexts. > macros don't give you thousands of programmers to test your language you made out of macros One does not need thousands of programmers. That's misguided. Macros can also be tested and used in any size of development context.

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