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> Lisp shepherds you into building your own language.

the feeling of the racket community is that you build a DSL or DSLs in your code all the time, in any language, so why not take it seriously and codify your DSLs?

My personal feeling about this is that shared base language mecanisms such as functions, classes, control structure, interfaces imports, properties etc allow you to reason locally about some files. You don't need to read the whole library in order to understand one piece of it.

With macros this goes out of the window. You have to read all the custom macros before you can understand what is their behavior.

With haskell the same issue exists with complex monad stacks and control libraries like lens.

The ability to analyse a tiny piece of a big system is a major factor in building those in a manageable way.

The beauty of macros is that you can just expand them in-place and read the expanded code.

Of course, for really complex macros the expanded code might be hard to read, but I guess that means "write nice macros".

I dont think list comprehensions are used to improve performance. One reason to use them is to improve readability, as the execution doesnt jump around with continue/break etc.

> - Android shepherds you into installing shedloads of apps you hardly ever use.

I disagree with you on this one but I could be in the minority. I have about 8 apps that I trust and that rarely change. I don't go looking for new apps to install and I resist attempts to use the app version of a website.

> Lisp shepherds you into building your own language

I see the propensity of developers to build DSLs in all languages. I think the act of programming shepards us into creating elaborate abstractions.

> and I resist attempts to use the app version of a website.

If you weren't being shepherded into installing apps, why are you resisting?

I could install apps on my old Nokia dumb phone, but I never resisted installing apps. It never really seemed like it was worth the trouble to install one.

I actually looked into it once, despite the system shepherding me away from installing apps.

Bash shepherds you into ignoring errors and using maybe-blank values everywhere.

You can improve that situation somewhat by starting scripts with `set -o errexit -o noclobber -o nounset -o pipefail` and `shopt -s failglob` to fail fast.

Yes, this makes things better.

But then you will have to deal with the non-negligible amount of programs that use the exit value to return information. It is still better to place exceptions on failing code than to ignore errors that can wipe out your entire system, but it's not really good either way.

I never missed any kind of IDEA features in Eclipse and Netbeans, including refactoring.

And yes I do know InteliJ, as I have to put up with it on Android Studio.

>since it's the only IDE which does this anywhere near reliably enough.

Have a look at the Language Server Protocol implementations for java (eclipse jdtls and to a lesser extent boot-ls). Not all the features from IDEA are there, but the gap is closing.

> Python shepherds you into using list comprehensions

I'd argue LCs have more limits than loops, and hence are easier to read (because you can make more assumptions about what it does). That said, I find nested comprehensions harder to read.

> Windows and Mac OS shepherd you into using GUIs for everything and trusting software by default.

Not sure how familiar you are with modern Windows, but you can try powershell. You can manage everything in Windows with it, and it’s a very cool shell language with a lot of feature.

(It’s also open source and multi platform)

I agree with what you said, but I also agree that Windows shepherds you into using GUIs for everything. It's possible to use powershell, but Windows makes GUIs seem like the "natural" way to do things.

Do you have any good sources for places to start learining powershell? I'm pretty comfortable in bash, but powershell scares me.

As someone who used PowerShell for a year and has used Bash for 10+, PowerShell is much less scary than Bash. The scariest thing about PowerShell is .NET, which (at least 8 years ago or so, so cue someone correcting that below) had extensive but often low quality documentation, with undocumented features you basically had to use to write useful code, uselessly trivial code examples (think "`0 + 0 == 0`" as an example of arithmetic) and some bad names. That's not to say Bash is better, just that they still had some way to go.

Microsoft online documentation is very good. I initially spent just a weekend trying to create a nice prompt, just because I was annoyed by the ugly “PS >” when using Windows. The online documentation had everything I needed, and I enjoyed so much that I switched all my systems to using powershell as their default shell.

You can start at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/learn/....

A quite nice feature is the command Get-Help:

Get-Help <a command> -Online

That will direct you to the documentation page specific to a command. That way you can discover the environment little by little by experimenting.

Also, the auto completion for all commands and their arguments is helpful to learn what is possible.

Also, if you want to keep your bash habits, be sure to install powershell 7, and enable the emacs edit mode (which is similar to bash defaults, with C-a, C-e, etc):

Set-PSReadlineOption -EditMode Emacs

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/psreadlin...