Re:Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)
by qwertyuiop924 on Saturday September 10, 2016 @07:12PM
(#12471309)
Like I said: the featured I find myself giving thanks for the most in lisp is 1) never having to remember syntax, or remember exactly how it works in ambiguous contexts, and 2) never having to figure out how to indent my code.
The big stuff is there when it matters, but the little stuff makes up the day-to-day.
I've actually spent something like a dozen years writing Common Lisp and Scheme macros for production software. But I try not to put the nastiest ones in blog posts. :-)
In my experience, real-world Lisp was often a surprisingly functional language, certainly by the standards of the day.
Based on working with real-life Lisp code bases at four different organizations, I also stand by my description of what Lisp macros in production software typically looked like in 2005. Sure, there was the occasional elaborate macro that implemented something like Prolog in Lisp, and it was glorious. But the actual day-to-day workhorse Lisp macros were less flashy—most of them delayed evaluation, improved syntax, or performed simple transformations.
Many of these things are extremely valuable, but you don't necessarily need the full power of macros to implement them.