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by banthar 3997 days ago
This is just what programmers do. They all have irresistible urge to write their own meta language on top of what they are using.

C programmers do that with pre-processor. C++ programmers do that with templates and pre-processor. Java programmers do that with annotations.

1 comments

And then you have Lisp, that said, "fuck it, let's keep just the meta-language!" :)
Not sure if you mean that positively, but considering your Java work, if meant positively, that is a huge compliment!
Oh, it certainly wasn't negative. I was doing Scheme long before I did Java, and I'm doing quite a bit of Clojure now, so I'm certainly a long-time Lisp fan.
As mentioned previously, I finished up some preliminary Java coursework. This was around the time our quasar and pulsar work took off in popularity.

I see you as a hero and hope for a 1/1000 of your productivity when I peak.

Glad to see you were a Schemer too.

I learned Scheme before I learned Java. Knowledge of lisp family languages makes me a far better Java programmer.
The thing is, will there be a time where people will stop dealing with a concrete specific language to stay at the `lisp` level, or will this keep going on forever ?
Because then you end up with millions of programmer-individual languages built using a meta-language.