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I actively want people to NOT change constant to c. I want the language to be a predictable shared base, not something I have to relearn and customize for every project. I'm not a language designer. That's hard. That takes time and effort. And I don't do anything that can't be done in Python or Dart or whatever. Customizing the language is time not spent on the project, and batteries included stuff already has everything I need. I think lisp is good for people who "think inside their heads", as in, they think "I want to do this, oh, I could do it this way, then I'd need this resource, let's build it". If you think "Interactively" as in "I want to do this, what does Google tell me others are doing, oh yeah, this was made almost exactly the same use case, I'll start with this resource, now I'll adapt my design to fit it", you might not have any ideas for language tweaks to make in the first place. I basically never code and think "I wish I could do that in this language" aside from minor syntactic sugar and library features. New abstractions and ideas don't just pop up in my mind, what the common mainstream languages have is the entirity of what programs are made of, as far as I'm concerned. |
However, any program that declares a variable or new function could be said to extend the language, since, if you declare some function, well, that function is now, at least in any proper language, as much part of the language of that program, as any builtin function is.
Sure, if all you have is an empty .c file, you can say "this program is standard C", but as soon as you've declared a variable or funciton, your program becomes in a way a superset of C, it is all the standard C plus the functions, datastructures and variables that you've defined, and to extend that program, it is not enough to keep strictly to the standard language, you must also take into consideration the superset of functionality that is part of the program..
In this way, programming is much more about creating a language that speaks natively in the abstractions of the domain, and then using that language to solve specific tasks within the domain.
And so it becomes that, you're always tweaking the language, it's just the degree to which you can tweak it that is different..