Comment by Zak
6 hours ago
It seems to me the Clojure community internalized the lesson of not writing macros unless it's really necessary more than other Lisps did.
6 hours ago
It seems to me the Clojure community internalized the lesson of not writing macros unless it's really necessary more than other Lisps did.
So does the community of every other dialect (Common Lisp, at least). Write a function if you don't have to write a macro, and maybe declaim the function to be inlined.
The "Lisp Curse" is a ridiculous and tired myth that can only be invented by people who have looked at the language for 5 seconds and went straight to finding an excuse to not learn it.
Is it? I saw macros and went mad with power. I wrote a macro that could have been a function today.
But seriously, I think Clojure has a particularly strong tradition of writing clean, readable code.
I believe the real issue is that Scheme, which was (through university) often the first and last contact of people with Lisp family languages, has greatly exaggerated case of "everyone reinventing the wheel", and that's before you get into educational reasons that led to people seeing very limited view of Scheme