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Comment by lgessler | Hacker News Reader

A cool story no doubt, and this is a blog post, so the author should write whatever they please. But as someone who likes Lisp and genuinely does believe Lisp-family languages have underappreciated and incredibly powerful benefits, I was dismayed to see them leap to the conclusion that it was grappling with s-expressions that allowed him to solve this problem so well. Non sequitur, navel gazey paeans to Lisp are among the reasons why people have so much trouble taking the wild claims Lispers make seriously.

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What benefit you think is underappreciated? It's a subjective point of view, but my experience is the contrary: that of Lisp-family languages being hyped to exhaustion.

The benefits of macros and code as data is under appreciated. It allows you to remove boilerplate code, and simplify your thought process, which makes for easier to read code. For example, in Clojure you can use macros to make a mini language that converts to HMTL at compile time:

  (defn index []
    (html5
      [:html
       [:head]
       [:body "the index-page"]]))

Or similarly create your route handler on the back end that will serve up your pages:

  (defroutes app-routes 
    (GET "/" [] (index)) 
    (route/resources "/") 
    ; if page is not found 
    (route/not-found "Page not found"))

Note how concise the language becomes, and this code will expand out to all of the necessary opening and closing tags or boiler plate code that makes your code safe and efficient. None of these syntax structures were previously in the language, they are instead created when needed for abstraction.

It seems to me that, if you were to write that in Java, these would just be regular functions returning arrays of Strings or something similar. There would be a similar shortening of the source code. (It still wouldn't be as short, of course, but the same shortening would take place.)

Am I missing something? What's the special macro-ness here that is different from regular functions?

The amount of effort it takes to write a "shortener". Yes, you could do this in java, most likely. However, it would take a ton of effort and likely still not cover as many cases as the easy to write lisp would.

As an example, I have the beginnings of something like that in javascript at http://taeric.github.io/DancingLinks.html (in the appendix. Functions "div, table, etc.") I've done similar in java before to get the same basic structure that I could run in any c like language. I still miss the flexibility of lisp.

edit: to see another example of mine showing some of the advantage of the "macroness" see http://taeric.github.io/CodeAsData.html and see how little code it took to make a tree walker in lisp. (Not just the tree walker, but indeed, the tree.)

One difference is flow control. When you call a function, all the arguments are evaluated before being passed into the function. If you want to delay evaluation, you have to wrap the argument values in a function. When you call a macro, the text forms get passed with no evaluation. Say Clojure forgot to ship with the boolean "or". "or" should evaluate its arguments one at a time (to allow for short circuiting) and return the first non-false value. You could do this with functions, but you have the source-level overhead of manually wrapping everything, and performance overhead of defining and passing an anonymous function for each argument. With a macro, at compile time you just translate the "or" macro into a simpler form that uses "if". This is how Clojure actually implements "or":

    (defmacro or
      "Evaluates exprs one at a time, from left to right. If a form
      returns a logical true value, or returns that value and doesn't
      evaluate any of the other expressions, otherwise it returns the
      value of the last expression. (or) returns nil."
      {:added "1.0"}
      ([] nil)
      ([x] x)
      ([x & next]
          `(let [or# ~x]
             (if or# or# (or ~@next)))))

Also check this http://lists.warhead.org.uk/pipermail/iwe/2005-July/000130.h...

Another key point is that most if not all of the replacements are done at compile time, therefore the final code only makes minimal function calls.

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