| I am going to argue for a most normal language with your points. > For example, consider logging libraries. It's useful to have statements like log.debug(someSlowFunction()) in your code. Java/C# have good debuggers and thus you can set breakpoints. You often want to have a debug printing in final release build anyway, activated through a --verbose option for example. Thus I think this is less useful than it seems. > Another aspect is the tooling. When I am considering a new library, I like to try it out in the REPL. In Clojure I can quickly start calling library functions, and use the (time) macro to get a sense of how long they take to evaluate. Not all popular languages are amenable to this kind of REPL-driven experimentation with libraries. In python REPL you can do a reasonable level of experimentation with libraries. You can't do weird stuff like runtime monkey patching but that's not always considered a good thing. In java also, there's jshell. (importing maven libs is little roundabout, but there are packages for that, and in return you get a solid ecosystem with static typing and great compilers / runtime. > Another major example is reagent vs. react. The concise hiccup representation supported by Reagent is only possible because of design decisions that went into Clojure. JavaScript users are stuck with JSX, which is less concise, and in my opinion far less good. It's a matter of opinion. In my opinion, jetpack compose or flutter (admittedly, fringe language but can be learnt by anyone with java or c# experience), are better way of doing UI than jsx / fxml etc.. > Even if you spend all day gluing together libraries, LISP makes that much better by improving how you can call libraries, how you can quickly experiment with them, and even what kinds of libraries can exist. I think benefits of macros is way overblown, and higher order functions with ocassionally well documented APIs that use compile-time or run-time reflection are good enough. Macros are not worth the readability and compile time sacrifices. Overall, my point is, blub paradox isn't one dimensional. I place more importance to tooling and libraries than language itself, as long as language isn't horrible. |