My resignation letter as R7RS-large chair

Re:My resignation letter as R7RS-large chair by chongli on Thursday August 17, 2023 @01:01PM (#37164741)

I think the biggest issue with any lisp is that it's just too damn powerful of a language. This makes it super easy for developers to create their own little ecosystem of macros and functions that nobody else can understand. This can be absolutely disastrous for large teams and companies looking to hire.

Languages that force you to be more verbose and don't let you build your own ultra-powerful abstractions seem to work better for large teams where you can force everyone to adopt a standard style. This makes onboarding much easier too.

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Re:My resignation letter as R7RS-large chair by remexre on Thursday August 17, 2023 @01:27PM (#37165197)

I dunno, I got a (Common) Lisp job, and I don't think I've ever had a problem where I didn't understand the semantics of a macro; people aren't just making a ton of them all the time for no reason, and the ones that are popular are from popular libraries (e.g. alexandria and iterate) and have clear semantics.

I think the same problem applies perfectly well to developers who "create their own little ecosystem of classes and functions nobody else can understand" -- I don't think [0] would be made any harder to understand by having macros involved.

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/15s0lp6/how_we... (only picking on it because I saw it recently)

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Re:My resignation letter as R7RS-large chair by tikhonj on Thursday August 17, 2023 @03:57PM (#37167111)

People say this, but it hasn't been my experience in practice—the worst, most complex codebases I've seen have been in Python and Java.

But I guess they look simple and uniform at a superficial, syntactic level. If you can't follow that it's your fault, if you can't follow Lisp code it's Lisp's fault...

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