Comment by timonoko
2 days ago
TLDR, but you are (probably) describing somekind of builtin property.
I am just saying that the end-user do not need macros for much anything, unless she has some specific optimization in mind. Bloody annoying when they start making cryptic macros to "extend the language".
"Need" is a very tenuous word, because most of any tool stack consists of benefits.
End users benefit from things that they don't strictly need.
Once you start talking about what people don't need, it's hard to do it in a way such that they need Lisp but don't need macros.
Sometimes "need" is about dependencies; i.e. things you "need" are provided by upstreams; you stop needing things that you made yourself.
E.g. "I don't need objects. Because, well, I have lambdas and macros, and with that control over syntax and semantics, I made my own objects. So, strictly speaking, I do need objects, just don't need them from you or anyone else."
People disagree over what constitutes a benefit; something someone finds beneficial in their work is crap to someone else, and the easiest way to disparage someone else's beneficial thing is resort to the necessity rhetoric.
"Everything that I found beneficial in conducting my successful XYZ project, which got to a level of complexity and quality in so many years of effort and lines of code, was obviously necessary; all else is unnecessary."
A really sneaky way to do that is to repeatedly acknowledge the benefit of something while emphasizing the lack of necessity. With a sprinkle of FUD about possible harms that outweigh benefits ...
I really do not understand this whining and downvoting.
In so-called real life somebody has to live with the malformed macro, whose only purpose is to beautify the code.
I even made un-macrofier, which deleted all macros and replaced instances with macroexpand, because slight adjustement of code resulted mysterious errors cause by nasty macroes.
And lets not talk about Common Lisp loop macro, which was probably scooped up from latrine of hell by the Devil himself.