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by culturedsystems 2060 days ago
Indeed, I think this post ends up being a good argument against Lisp. The supposed negative for JS, as opposed to Lisp, is that "We’d need something like Babel to parse our file, and work on top of the AST to make sure we rewrite our code safely." And? Computers are good at parsing, and adding syntax to a language should be comparatively rare, so why would I choose a language that optimizes for this case, rather than one which optimizes for human readability?

I think some people will argue that macros shouldn't be rare, that you should define a custom DSL for each application so you can work at a higher level of abstraction. However, macros themselves operate at a fairly low level of abstraction (operating on the AST, rather than closer to the problem domain). I would argue that if you find yourself using macros frequently, that's a sign your language is lacking in higher-level abstraction capabilities.
2 comments
Joker_vD 2059 days ago
> Computers are good at parsing,

And humans are even better at it, and actually seem to cope with typographically diverse syntax better than the uniform ones. So it absolutely makes sense to have a nice, heterogeneous, human-friendly syntax.

As for writing custom DSLs... I always feel vaguely uneasy when I find myself writing, essentially, an interpreter/VM for a simplistic programming language in a form of a set of library routines/components that I then process to use to build my application logic out of. After all, I am already writing code in a rich programming language, why don't I just use it for my application logic in the first place?

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wtetzner 2059 days ago
> After all, I am already writing code in a rich programming language, why don't I just use it for my application logic in the first place?

I'd assume it's because that rich language isn't as well-suited to the problem domain as the DSL. I think one solution might be to come up with a more principled way of writing DSLs, that don't require you to revert to writing an interpreter or compiler "from scratch".

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wtetzner 2059 days ago
> Computers are good at parsing, and adding syntax to a language should be comparatively rare, so why would I choose a language that optimizes for this case, rather than one which optimizes for human readability?

Having everything be uniform has other advantages, but I think they end up being more subjective. Some people like the regularity, because they don't have to remember so many different kinds of syntax. Other people prefer different kinds of syntax, because they find it easier to read. I don't think there's an object measure here, because it all depends on your past experience and your preferences.

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