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Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

OO, perhaps, but without dynamism and late binding, metaprogramming is difficult, as is any number of techniques. Like, for instance, class generation, and extending methods.

And while I don't set much store by inheritance, it set considerably more store by duck-typing and polymorphism.

>None of these are required for ease of development. At least the first two often result in precisely the opposite.

So are you talking about Java-style OO? Because I was talking about Smalltalk OO, which is pretty different.

Required, no, but they're tools, and they come in handy. Certainly make development a lot more comfortable.

And some of the time, they make delvelopment a lot easier.

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> Like, for instance, class generation, and extending methods.

This is precisely the kind of thing that leads to unmaintainable "magic" code, even though it can still be useful but with extreme moderation. So I don't see the point of making that a core feature of any language.

If you have any example to the contrary, I'd love a link to a good open-source project that uses these things extensively.

RSpec? A lot of ruby uses metaprogramming in some respect.

As for not seeing the point of making it a feature of your language, how about Lisp? And I'm not just talking macros. Lambdas, late binding, and in Scheme, the ability to rebind anything lead to a lot of cool tricks and capabilities.

And late binding is extrordinarily important.!

I don't consider the Ruby ecosystem to be a good example of much. Idiomatic Ruby code is much slower and usually not more maintainable than C++. Actually, it may even be worse thanks to dynamic typing, which makes refactoring much more painful than it already is in large code bases.

Well I guess it's good at making CRUD web sites. Hardly rocket science.

Okay then: Lisp.

Tinyclos is a fairly sophisticated implementation of OO and the MOP, written in Scheme.

Its descendants, COOPS, GOOPS, and others, are in most schemes today. Many of them are written in their respective dialect of scheme, with little or no specific compiler support.

SXML allows for writing XML in native scheme syntax.

The anaphoric macros (aif, acond, etc.) are all, well, macros, and thus use metaprogramming principles.

tclOO, [incr tcl], and other OO TCL systems are usually implemented in regular TCL.

Give or take, any large Lisp or Smalltalk codebase takes advantage of dynamic typing, late binding, and some form of metaprogramming.

However, you've made it clear that you hate Ruby, Dynamic Typing, and other such things, as given as much of metaprogramming requires this sort of flexibility, I very much doubt anything I say will convince you that dynamic languages are in any way useful.

I don't hate them. I've used python more than once, and will continue to do so. And I think it's great teaching material. It's a good scripting language. But I think its drawbacks far outweigh its advantages for large projects.

All your examples are programming gimmicks, and I've yet to see stuff that solves actual hard problems. I'm not interested in programming for programming's sake. I want to use it to make my computer do useful stuff.

Gimmicks? Some of them, yes, but CLOS and its descendants are used in Real applications, as are the TCL OO systems. But if you want Real World, I'll give you real world.

Maxima is a descendant of the original MACSYMA, developed at MIT. It is still a usable and viable system, even if it has ageda bit.

Emacs is a popular programmer's text editor written in C and a dialect of lisp.

Both of the above programs are large, useful, and written in an HLL - one particularly amenable to pointer chasing, I might add - and they make use of the variety of abstractions which that HLL provides.

If those aren't modern enough for you, check out some Clojure applications.

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