From: Martin Coxall <pseudo.meta@...>
Date: 2006-10-01T19:12:41+09:00
Subject: Re: "Succinctness is Power", by Paul Graham

>
> Well, considering that Paul Graham is a Lispnik, I think we can infer
> what his definitions of "powerful" and "succinct" in a programming
> language are. What would be interesting to me would be where he stands
> on the great "Common Lisp vs. Scheme" divide.

He's definitely from the Schemer tradition; Favouring recursion over  
iteration even though Common Lisp is not tail-recursive; Eschewing  
Common Lisp's powerfool 'Loop' construct because it's not lispish  
enough; Frequently explaining how using OO, and in especial, CLOS,  
are simply artifacts of not knowing how to use macros and lambdas  
properly; Listing a feature set for that 'dream lisp' you're going to  
create one day which has almost a one-to-one feature parity with  
Scheme R6RS.


> Perhaps more to the point would be a comparison of Lisp, Scheme and  
> Ruby
> as hosts for internal domain-specific languages. Didn't somebody do  
> that
> already?
>

Down that way lies flamewars, madness and death. I reckon it is  
sufficient to notice that Scheme is a little too minimalist to be a  
useful general-purpose language, the relative paucity of Lisp's  
library ecosystem works against its chances of ever breaking the  
mainstream and that Matz admits himself to borrowing good things  
liberally from Lisp(s) just as from Smalltalk and Perl, Ruby's two  
other formidable forbears.

In any case, there's a question about about to what extent you  
*should* host DSLs internally. It's my feeling that if you want to  
inline a DSL in your code, make sure that language is still  
syntactically recognizably a Ruby. Ruby on Rails is a classic example.

If you want to create a non-idiomatic, syntactically strange DSL and  
inline it in your code via abuse of language facilities, that's how  
you end up with Common Lisp's 'Loop' Macro. It's not good, and it's  
definitely ugly, as Paul Graham says.

Once you cross that line where your DSL is no longer 'a Ruby', create  
a grammar for it and knock together a parser for it in Racc.

Martin