Hi,
Perl is my favorite language, and I'm eagerly following Perl 6 development. So
I would like to ask this question here. Sorry if I'm being inconvenient...
Do you think that Lisp macros make the language more powerful than others (eg
Perl)? I mean, do they really give a competitive advantage, or are they being
overrated (see below)?
I've been reading Paul Graham's articles (www.paulgraham.com), they are very
interesting. Here's a paragraph from "Beating the Averages":
But I think I can give a kind of argument that might be convincing.
The source code of the Viaweb editor was probably about 20-25%
macros. Macros are harder to write than ordinary Lisp functions,
and it's considered to be bad style to use them when they're not
necessary. So every macro in that code is there because it has to
be. What that means is that at least 20-25% of the code in this
program is doing things that you can't easily do in any other
language. However skeptical the Blub programmer might be about my
claims for the mysterious powers of Lisp, this ought to make him
curious. We weren't writing this code for our own amusement. We
were a tiny startup, programming as hard as we could in order to
put technical barriers between us and our competitors.
What do you think? I have very little Lisp experience...
Thanks,
--
Adriano
