On Tuesday, October 31, 2017 at 11:05:30 AM UTC+5:30, Steve D'Aprano wrote: > On Tue, 31 Oct 2017 02:26 pm, Rustom Mody wrote: > > > My own feeling about lisp-macros is conflicted: > > - They are likely the most unique feature of lisp, putting it at the top of > > the blub-language tower > > - They are the single reason Lisp can never succeed like mainstream > > languages: Any significant Lisp sub-ecosystem will inevitably develop a > > macro set which succinctly and precisely expresses its needs but is arcane > > and incomprehensible to someone from another sub-ecosystem. > > Well said. That's one of the disadvantages of Forth as well: since Forth > allows you to define your own control-structures, even the structure of the > code can be unfamiliar. > > Another way to put it might be that any sufficiently complex Lisp program > doesn't look like Lisp any more.
It seems we agree on the facts but not the accounting Facts: A fixed syntax language (C, Java, Python etc) is likely to have similar looking programs across a wide spectrum of applications as compared to a syntax-definable-at-runtime language like Lisp Accounting: You seem to count this as advantage to fixed-syntax? Note that if you carry this principle all the way, any application whatever running on an x86 will be running x86 instructions; which look more uniform than the diverse hl-languages that produced them. > > Except perhaps for the myriad parentheses *wink* Not so: reader-macros can change lisp all the way to the lexical level And used to do things like html-templating, sql-embedding etc -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list