[Hirrolot]

In programming language design, we tend to distinguish between global and local analysis. While type checking and elaboration is an example of global analysis, desugaring is inherently local to some piece of code. Therefore, "power" or "expressiveness" usually mean that something cannot be syntactically "expanded"; e.g., while type classes elaborate into explicit dictionaries, they still require information from the type checker, and therefore considered a "real" feature of a programming language. On the other hand, nested pattern matching can be formulated as local syntax transformation, and therefore it doesn't bring anything fundamentally new to the type system or dynamic semantics.

There's also a great talk on the matter [1], if somebody is interested in formalities.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43XaZEn2aLc

[mitt_romney_12]

You're approaching this from a PL design standpoint where the distinction is important, but from a user perspective it doesn't matter if it's just "syntax sugar" or if it's a super complicated to implement all that matters is whether the feature is available or not.

[Hirrolot]

Typing features affect the way we design APIs. Libraries written in languages with type classes and without them can have completely different designs. If nested pattern matching is not available, this will not affect the APIs, only the function bodies -- because desugaring is local by definition.

[chongli]

That doesn't matter in practice. If two programming languages have the same underlying feature but one has syntactic sugar to make it very easy to use and the other does not (so is quite cumbersome to use) then you'll find that the library ecosystem for the former language will see the feature in widespread use whereas the ecosystem of the latter will tend to shun the feature.

This is one of the social factors of programming language design and it's one of the main reasons successful programming languages work so hard to establish a coherent philosophy and a set of best practices or idioms within the language. For similar reasons, I believe this is why "anything goes" languages such as LISP have struggled to gain widespread adoption: with no philosophy every programmer becomes an island unto themselves.

[lispm]

> "anything goes" languages such as LISP have struggled to gain widespread adoption: with no philosophy every programmer becomes an island unto themselves.

There are already two misconceptions.

First: "Lisp has no programming philosophies" and styles.

Not every program starts by zero. Since Lisp exists since the end 1950s, it has seen quite a lot in programming styles over the years and it may contain traces of several. Generally it may support more than one programming paradigm. For example during the Common Lisp standardization there was a wish to have a standardized object system. So instead of the multiple possible approaches (actors, message passing, prototype-based, ...), Common Lisp has just one: CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System. So, much of the object-oriented code written in CL is implemented in one particular object system: CLOS. Object Lisp, Flavors, LOOPs, Common Objects, and a bunch of other once had thus been replaced by one standard.

CLOS also defines a bunch of user-level macros: DEFCLASS, DEFMETHOD, DEFGENERIC, ... Everyone using CL & CLOS will use those macros.

Second: "every programmer becomes an island unto themselves". If we look at the way CLOS was designed: there was a core group of six people from three companies. Around that there was a mailing-list based communication with a large group of interested people. Early on a prototype was implemented as a portable implementation of CLOS. This was widely distributed among interested parties: implementors, companies, research groups, ... Then reports about the language extension and its layers were published, books were published, application & library code was published.

One of famous books coming out of this effort: "The Art of the Meta-Object Protocol". It contained also a toy implementation of CLOS in Common Lisp. Book and the implementation of CLOS (both the larger prototype and the toy implementation) showed in excellent quality how to write object-oriented Lisp code.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262610742/the-art-of-the-metaob...

So, there are communities, which share code and coding styles. Not every programmer is alone and starts from zero.

[chongli]

First: "Lisp has no programming philosophies" and styles

You misquoted me. I said no philosophy, singular. In the programming language context, a philosophy is a convention or a standard. Just as many standards implies that there is no standard, many philosophies implies no philosophy.

Everything else you said is evidence for my premise. Hire 3 different programmers, one from each of the communities, and you might as well have 3 different programming languages. That’s not a standard. That’s not a philosophy. That’s anything goes!

[kazinator]

There is rather no evidence for your premise.

Most of the Common Lisp code that is accessible via public repositories conforms to conventions and is understandable.

Lisp programmers are highly motivated toward encouraging collaboration, since there aren't that many people in Lisp where you can afford to be turning people away toward projects that are easier to get into.

Also, you can easily hire 3 developers and get 3 different languages in, oh, Java or JavaScript. One person is doing Kotlin, another one Scala, ...

Three C++ programmers in the same room could also not understand each other. The greybeard speaking only C++98 with a bit of 2003 doesn't grok the words coming out of the C++20 girl's mouth and so it goes.

[lispm]

> You misquoted me. I said no philosophy, singular. In the programming language context, a philosophy is a convention or a standard. Just as many standards implies that there is no standard, many philosophies implies no philosophy.

That makes no sense.

> Hire 3 different programmers, one from each of the communities, and you might as well have 3 different programming languages.

Maybe not. They build on the same foundation, a language with a large standard, which is largely unchanged since three decades. A language which can be incrementally extended, without invalidating the rest. A language where extensions can be embedded, without invalidating the rest of the language or its tools. Many projects use SBCL (now itself 25 years old and only incrementally grown) and a bunch of core libraries for it.

> That’s not a standard. That’s not a philosophy. That’s anything goes!

Most languages support widely different software development practices. Take JavaScript: it includes imperative, object-oriented and functional elements (similar to Lisp). It has huge amounts of competing frameworks (many more than any Lisp), where many of them have been superseded and many of them are built on a multitude of other libraries. The developer can pick and choose. Each projects will be different from other projects, depending on which libraries and programming frameworks it uses - and which of those the developer re-invents.

Any half-way powerful language (C++ -> templates, Ruby -> meta objects, Java -> objects & byte code & reflection & class loader, Smalltalk -> meta objects, Rust -> macros, C++ -> language interpreters, Java -> external configuration languages, C -> macro processor, ...) has ways to adapt the language to a certain style & domain.

Any large Java framework defines new standards, new configuration mechanisms, new ways to use new Java features (lambdas, streams, ...). See the large list of features added to the Java language over time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history For many of them there were competing proposals. Each Java code base will use some subset/superset of these features, depending on what is needed and what the personal preferences are. And then the Java architect in the project will not be satisfied and will invent yet another configuration system, this time not using XML or JSON for the syntax, but develop a new embedded scripting language for the JVM and integrate that with his software. I have seen Java architects which eventually didn't understand their own configuration system any more.

If you think a language like Common Lisp is special here, then in reality it is not. It's just slightly different in that it has extensibility as one of its philosophies and provides defined interfaces for that. There is one macro mechanism, which is powerful enough, that for decades it has not been replaced. Every syntactic extension mechanism will use this macro system, which is documented, stable and widely used.

[medo-bear]

> I believe this is why "anything goes" languages such as LISP

Why do you think that Lisp is an "anything goes" language? What's your baseline? I think that C is no less an "anything goes" language, but with a much less pleasant UI.

> with no philosophy every programmer becomes an island unto themselves

Some people actually think that Lispers tend to be too philosophical

[chongli]

Lisp is anything goes because of macros. Hire ten different Lisp programmers and you’ll get ten different domain specific languages and no one will understand what everyone else has done. If there is a unifying philosophy of Lisp, it’s probably “don’t use macros” and yet so many ignore it!

For all its faults, C is quite easy to read and understand, even by beginner C programmers. Yes, C also has macros but their clumsiness helps to discourage their use.

[medo-bear]

I'm a Common Lisp programmer. I don't really know how to respond to that except to say, what you describe is not the case at all. Reading others' Common Lisp code is a joy compared to reading others' code in any other language.

[Hirrolot]

Yes, features that are easy to use will be more often used, while inconvenient features will be less used. I don't quite see any controversy with my comment.

[chongli]

The point is that in both cases the underlying feature is present, so APIs will be compatible. However, the lack of syntactic sugar in the one case will make any API that uses the feature cumbersome to use in that language, so in practice it will be avoided.

[tialaramex]

Abstractly this is true, but software development is a human practice, so it matters not what's technically possible but what people actually do.

That's why the most important difference between C++ and Rust isn't some technicality even though the technical differences are huge, it's cultural. Rust has a Safety Culture and everything else is subservient to that difference.

Sugar matters, Rust's familiar looking loops are just sugar, it only "really" has a single way to do loops, the loop construct, an infinite loop you can break out of. But despite that, people deliberately write the other loops - and the linter strongly recommends that they write them, because the programs aren't just for machines to compile, they're for other humans to read, and a while let loop is an intuitive thing to read for example, so is the traditional for-each style iterator loop.