I think the point is that Lisp lets you create an ad-hoc, poorly-specified version of any language you like, or perhaps several mashed together, which feels great at the time, but feels horrible when you come back to it later.
DSLs/Jargon/New Languages are constructing a new world, and you need to be really sure the costs of that abstraction are outweighed by concrete and lasting benefits in the domain (sometimes they are, oftentimes they are not), crucially, this sort of language is often best used for a very specific domain and nowhere else (say R for statistics).
Re:3.5 Years, 500k Lines of Go
by erik_seaberg on Friday March 24, 2017 @09:54PM
(#13953656)
The DSL doesn't go away. Your only choices are to implement it, or else read and write the boilerplate you get by imperfectly compiling it in your head.
I agree we're just shifting complexity around, and sometimes it's a matter of taste where it goes, but very flexible languages do allow you to construct a world that is very difficult for others to understand or trace execution in.
And speaking of DSLs, the Pandas and Numpy libraries in Python are super useful, and they're possible because Python offers enough metaprogramming facilities to create such libraries, which go a long ways to offering to kinds of programming you find in R or Matlab.
So maybe the Lisp way wasn't wrong? Instead of a bunch of Lisp DSLs we end up with a bunch of programming languages.