Re: Looking for volunteers for XL

On Nov 27, 12:19 am, "BartC" <b...@freeuk.com> wrote:
> Extensible languages have to be used with some care I think. Those
> features aren't for everyday use.


Apply your reasoning to libraries, and you'll see its limits. "It's
not necessary to make available to the Unix programmer all those
untidy function-building features". I heard that exact reasoning from
Basic gurus hearing about Pascal: "User-defined procedures? That can't
be for everyday use. Who would need to add their own keywords? Leave
that to Basic designers."


In reality, the majority of notations, vocabulary, idioms are private,
even in real life. The point of a programming language is to provide
easy to use notations for your ideas. You can only benefit from the
notations suiting the ideas better. The objections that making a
language extensible necessarily makes it unreadable or fragile flies
in the face of our experience with other forms of abstractions, and
even of the limited experience we have with those few languages that
are actually extensible, such as most Lisp derivatives.


[Well, you know, given a choice between my personal experience that
languages with extensible syntax led to unreadable programs, and
hand-waving that this time is somehow different or I didn't see what I
saw, I know what I'd choose. You're welcome to build any language you
want, but you have a rather steep hill to climb to persuade people
that your language doesn't have all the same problems that previous
failures had. -John]

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