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by g00z
743 days ago
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The example of electric is really good. It's something that would require bonkers amounts of effort to implement in ts/js, but instead 15 contributors could build in clojurescript. And I think the core thing that makes it possible is that the design decisions in lisp, optimize to provide expressive power to the user, because as a language designer I cannot perfectly plan what you will build. Which in turn enables the users to build things that would require crazy effort in more traditional languages. And yet, most programmers have an irrational fear of built-in metaprogramming because it "makes hard to understand code". But seemingly nobody is afraid of bad metaprogramming, like code generation. Which I would argue is more difficult to understand. Seemingly, any sufficiently hard problem requires some new language constructs to be built to discuss it in a way that makes sense. A good example of this is react. It's a framework in JS, but when using react you aren't really writing normal js. You are writing react. This is magnified when using jsx, which few people will complain about using, as it makes the process of writing react code much more enjoyable. |
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The difference here is that “bad meta programming” happens when the people writing thorny libraries and frameworks clamor enough for meta programming that the language implementers shoehorn in a subpar implementation. These people know how important it is to programmatically generate and modify code, because they had problems that just couldn’t be solved without that, and the other language users never see it (very few programmers in most non-Lisp ecosystems are curious about the code of libraries they use) and so don’t care whether or not it exists.
On the other hand, a language with pervasive meta programming is going to have cases where you could do a task without that feature, but can do that task much more easily with it. Meaning that of the programmers using that language, everyone in the subset of “programmers that like to minimize what they need to learn as much as possible” will be exposed to code using meta programming.
Most of these engineers will not have the prior experiences to understand that “ok, we need to learn meta programming either way because it’s essential to many important coding tasks and so has to be in the language; it’s not an increase in learning/comprehension difficulty to also have it in code that doesn’t strictly require it”. As such, their reaction is simply “why do I have to learn how to work around this extra thing?! Get rid of it, now!!!”.