Re: Macros, hard sell [was Re: Excavators [was: A language idea:Elle]]

[Scott McKay <address@hidden>]

At 4:48 PM -0500 1/7/03, Shriram Krishnamurthi wrote:
>Reginald Braithwaite-Lee wrote:
>
>>  I also recall a lively discussion around "macros" at LL2. Apparantly,
>>  many of us feel macros make a language more useful, and yet langauges
>>  with macros are a hard sell.
>
>Let's consider two prominent languages with macros.

Without commenting on anything else here, I need to point out
that C does not have anything like the "macros" that people were
talking about at LL2.  C has a weak text substitution facility.

Organizations adopt {languages,tools,practices...} for all kinds
of reasons, some good, but more often (in my experience) bad.
In my opinion, there are very few lessons we can learn from this
as designers of languages and tools.  There are lots of lessons
we can learn as "salesmen".


>Language    Hard Sell
>---------------------
>Scheme      yes
>C           no
>
>I don't even see a correlation, much less causality.  (I'm
>intentionally neglecting languages like Lisp, whose hardness-of-sell
>have varied over time.  Likewise, I'm also ignoring first cousins of
>macros, such as templates.)
>
>Perhaps you mean that *macros* are a hard sell?
>
>Shriram