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Comment by bjoli | Hacker News Reader

it allows you to create a language that compiles to your original language.

You can abstract everything away. Not like Haskell where laziness accounts for some and typeclasses for some (and often an exponential growth in compile times). No, it property let's you change the language.

I got tired of loops sucking and made this, for example: https://rikspucko.koketteriet.se/bjoli/goof-loop

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This doesn't strike me as better than the alternatives. In Haskell, it's just a few different functions to handle the different use cases. That strikes me as far better than one "function" that magically does different things depending on how it's called. It is local, I'll give you that. But it still seems bad because you have overloaded the semantics along multiple axes simultaneously. I prefer building blocks with only a single set of semantics each. I believe it's better to write precise code than DWIM code.

everybody agrees, which is why most sane people very rarely reach for macros. At the same time, it would be great if some of the libraries that rely on typeclass machinery for code generation could use lisp-like macros, because turning a 3 second recompile to a 35 second recompile (and I have experienced worse. Much worse.) is what kills exploratory programming. I heard optics mostly solves much of the problems of generic lens, but god forbid you use something like servant or polysemy.

Chez compiles a project of about 35000 lines (with heavy macro usage) in less than 0.5s on -O2.

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