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Comment by rndmio | Hacker News Reader

> You failed to understand the entire concept.

I don't think so. As the article states, this is a social/community issue, if every application has it's own language and syntax that is a huge barrier for others coming to work on it. You might not care about that but most large pieces of software are not written by one person. Beyond that you come to issues of code and skill reuse. A lot of people dislike the expressibility of Go, but it's hard to write code that someone else can't easily come and read and understand.

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> As the article states

The article is plain wrong.

> if every application has it's own language and syntax that is a huge barrier for others coming to work on it

And this is quite obviously not true. A well designed (note the emphasis!) DSL makes any app/problem domain/library/whatever much more accessible than any kind of a "general purpose" language can. Simply because DSL does not obscure the essence of the problem.

> Beyond that you come to issues of code

Code reuse with DSLs is way beyond anything the inferior languages can achieve. I witnessed cases where 30+ years old DSLs got revived by reimplementing them from scratch, immediately making an entire (huge) code base available on a new platform, with new tools and bells and whistles.

> and skill reuse.

One should never care about those pitiful "language" skills. They're worthless.

Your argument here seems to be that even if the majority of programmers find Lisp and all its derivatives to be difficult to read, we're wrong.

No, it's more of a No True Scotsman. People have written DSLs that are unreadable, but those DSLs weren't Well Designed(TM). So their failures don't count against DSLs, because only well designed DSLs count.

I think empirical evidence is that DSLs are easy to make not readable, especially as they evolve. Then again, that's true of almost everything, including assembly language programming, structured programming, object oriented programming, and functional programming (did I miss anything?).

I was talking about the well designed DSLs. This should include a decent syntax.

> As the article states, this is a social/community issue, if every application has it's own language and syntax that is a huge barrier for others coming to work on it.

Every application already has its own vocabulary, which is a huge barrier for others coming to work on it (seriously: try to check out the Linux kernel, or Firefox, or the Python interpreter, and try to start hacking on them).

Macros and custom syntax can help make that vocabulary more understandable, in the same way that functions can help make control flow more understandable.

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