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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there's something so comforting about having a concrete language you can rest your back up against though. Once you start throwing in #DEFINEs and typedefs, I start to question whether I can trust anything I'm seeing on the screen to not be hiding crucial secrets from me.

Maybe it's just me.

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Having constraints imposed upon me by my tools is the only way anything ever gets done. If you put me in front of a blank canvas, and then tell me I can alter the nature of the canvas itself to whatever extent I desire (I.e. in hopes of making using it easier), I'll never get to the point where I'm actually painting on it. Or, perhaps I do manage to produce an end result, but no one else can understand what it means.

Even with a mountain of constraints, there is still usually far too much subjectivity in software development. This language seems to me to be moving the needle in a very wrong direction. Having a stable basis that is standardized and everyone can (mostly) agree upon is the foundation for growing a technical team or community. Being able to type "LINQ GroupBy Select examples" into your preferred search engine of choice and receive actionable advice is clearly an advantage for productivity. Sure, in a purely academic sense there is almost certainly a more ideal solution. But, if you are seeking to actually get things done, constraints are the name of the game.

I remember some interview with Ulrich Schnauss (electronic artist) where he went back to plain synthesisers for the same reason. Too many things to tweak meant he wasn't able to focus on the piece.

> Once you start throwing in #DEFINEs and typedefs,

> I start to question whether I can trust anything I'm

> seeing on the screen to not be hiding crucial secrets from me.

What could go wrong? Try my cool optimizations!

#define while if // saves cpu cycles

#define struct union // saves memory

> #define while if // saves cpu cycles

lol, thanks for the laugh!

What you said really resonates with me - especially re: resting your back up against it.

Just built my first single-page website with React and I ran up against the new Javascript ES6 import system. It makes no sense that people keep introducing this kind of unnecessary complexity into their tools. What was wrong with good old "require"?

This is just one instance among many many many. It feels like I'm aging a year every day.

You don't know what all those library calls do behind the scenes either.

No, this is precisely how most Lisps shoot themselves in the foot. When you can do anything, people make these walled gardens/ivory towers of processing frameworks and libraries.

The users of Lisps are often very intelligent single-hero developers as well (why, Paul Graham's Lisp article is a perfect example of it).

And since documentation is ALWAYS terrible for anything except trivial things...

Lisps don't shoot themselves in the foot any more than chainsaws cut their own limbs off.

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