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Comment by petervandijck | Hacker News Reader

Cool, but what about code maintainability? Why add microlanguages? I'm sure your microlanguage is superintuitive to you, because you wrote it, but I, as a new coder on your code, don't want to learn it.

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> I'm sure your microlanguage is superintuitive to you, because you wrote it, but I, as a new coder on your code, don't want to learn it.

I'm sure your API is superintuitive to you, because you wrote it, but I, as a new coder on your code, don't want to learn it.

I'm sure your library is superintuitive to you, because you wrote it, but I, as a new coder on your code, don't want to learn it.

Mmm. No. It takes longer to learn a language than an API, in general. I don't think I'm wrong about that?

That is a valid concern, although a well designed micro language will likely also reduce the code base significantly and thereby leave less to learn. If it is well constructed it will also serve as an easy way of learning about the domain which you will have to anyway.

Fair enough. Or, a well designed micro language may just be that, well designed but entirely unnecessary :)

As anamax points out, you could say the same thing about a well designed anything, so this isn't an argument against languages, so it isn't an argument at all. It reminds me of how most of the objections people make to macros apply just as well to functions.

Touché!

Every codebase and accompanying API is something you have to learn. If you don't want to learn, best not ever do maintenance. A "microlanguage" is just better suited to the problem domain than a normal API.

In this case, he's trying to make it more idiomatic within the surrounding Clojure code, and thus, more intuitive for the intended user.

See http://paulgraham.com/progbot.html

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