We Should Be Able to Change Our Languages (jimmyhmiller.com)
17 points by surprisetalk 47 days ago | 2 comments

tombert 46 days ago [–]

At the risk of being a bit of a douchebag, it seems like nearly every tech opinion piece I read now boils down to "things used to be hard but they aren't anymore because LLMs can understand things faster than we can, so can ignore/change fundamentals!"I didn't really find the argument convincing the first time and I don't really find it convincing now.That said, with regards to macros, I actually do agree that the fear against them is broadly overblown. I have seen scary terrible horrifying macro soup in Clojure, but that has generally been outlier cases. Something like core.async abuses the hell out of macros, and despite that I think it very often increases readability and understanding of the language.

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pie_flavor 46 days ago [–]

Rust has been a practical experiment in macros for ten years now. I think it is safe to say the results are in: macros are great, and you just needed to have a better style of macros. Making and using something like tokio::select! in C-style macros is miserable, but tokio::select! is easy to use and understand in Rust.

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