Thank you Paul Graham for the Lisp renaissance.
Say what you like about the tenets of Lisp, Dude, at least it's an ethos.
Some signs that Lisp has now gained significant mindshare again:
- Designers explicitly state that they won't have macros or don't have them yet: Deca, Lua
- Languages actually do add macros: Scala, Elixir
Now the big problem is that, as they say, in CS not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don't learn from our successes.
Let me tell you: people will spend the next 20+ years reinventing hygienic macros. (Or they could just use fexprs, and get hygiene for free.)
Don't forget Perl 6 has AST macros.
ReplyDeleteThe lack of macros was probably mentioned in the Lua talk because the topic comes up frequently in the Lua discussion list.
ReplyDeleteI think that many Lua users who request macros are thinking of c-style macros. However, Metalua has gone a long way towards opening people's eyes to lisp-style macros. (Metalua actually supports both AST and source-text macros. It's a very interesting package.)
For me, a memorable moment at IPL09 (a rare instance of a conference I was able to attend) was when, in the panel on the future of Lisp, Pascal Costanza mentioned fexprs for the 50-year time scale.
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