Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 24.184.165.167]
on May 26, 2008 04:41 AM
Having worked with both, I have to say that for *most* tasks that Lisp style macros are suited to, the reflection and mutability of a flexible language like Ruby is just as appropriate, and -far- easier to debug.
This certainly wouldn't have been the case in the 80s when performance was at a premium and getting a dynamic language to do any heavy lifting required more advanced tricks, but these days I'd rather not have to deal with a debugger pointing me to a heap of generated code.
Lisp (by which I mean Scheme, CL is a hydra with a spec longer than C++'s) is great though. My favorite language for experimenting and exploring and prototyping. I just wouldn't focus too much on the macros. Hygenic or no, they're a leaky way to abstract.
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Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 24.184.165.167] on May 26, 2008 04:41 AMThis certainly wouldn't have been the case in the 80s when performance was at a premium and getting a dynamic language to do any heavy lifting required more advanced tricks, but these days I'd rather not have to deal with a debugger pointing me to a heap of generated code.
Lisp (by which I mean Scheme, CL is a hydra with a spec longer than C++'s) is great though. My favorite language for experimenting and exploring and prototyping. I just wouldn't focus too much on the macros. Hygenic or no, they're a leaky way to abstract.
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