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Gödel, Escher, Elisp: The Beauty of Macros chiply.dev

thisisauserida minute ago

I always thought it odd that Penrose gets dropped from the Escher conversations.

mekenan hour ago

> To anticipate a common question: why couldn't my-unless be a function? Function arguments are evaluated eagerly, before the function ever sees them.

Interesting, so if you’re using a lazy language then you don’t need a macro here and could write my-unless as a function.

brabel27 minutes ago

Yes, the D language has that as a feature in function arguments!

https://dlang.org/articles/lazy-evaluation.html

It makes it hard to know when things run. In Lisp you also have that problem everywhere, of course.

As the post shows this allows you to do stuff that looks like extending the syntax of the language.

I can’t decide if I love it or hate it!

kimian hour ago

Remember the golden rule of Lisp macros: don't write a macro.

[deleted]28 minutes agocollapsed

KeenanKeenanan hour ago

If macros can implement arbitrary language features then how come elisp has never built a type system?

BeetleB33 minutes ago

I would expect you can.

lexilambda created Typed Racket on top of Racket. https://github.com/racket/typed-racket

wk_end41 minutes ago

KeenanKeenan35 minutes ago

Typed racket too, might I add. I just imagine static typing around stable core APIs would help users understand how eglot and vertico compare to prior art. The way I learned how the completion stack works was to ask claude to show me what the elisp entrypoints would look like if implemented in typescript. It's not because I'm unfamiliar with lisp, I'm not, it's just easier to reason with the world in terms of data structures and their contracts.

[deleted]an hour agocollapsed

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