[mncharity]

> to really put [a] language to work you need to be aware of limits of the implementations, and how to dance around them

This seems generally an important and underdocumented aspect of language characterization. I wonder how that might be improved?

[marmaduke]

Well, instead of a language pretending the abstractions are watertight, be transparent: present them as leaky or whatever. Pure functions are a good example of abstraction since you can always step in, see what’s happening and step out. Stricts are ok. Macros are ok. From then on, someone somewhere is hiding something and you have to figure it out. This happens at the CPU level as well.