Is metaprogramming useful?

[Brad Anderson]

Don Clugston wrote:
> Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
>> "Brad Anderson" <brad at dsource.org> wrote in message
>> news:ekhh7s$2e7$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
>>
>>> Poor Lisp.  It just sits there, 50 years old, debugged, optimized,
>>> and ready
>>> to go, while the imperative languages try to inch closer over the
>>> decades.
>>
>> In that case.. it'd be another interesting experiment to try to come
>> up with a new syntax for Lisp that appeals to more programmers than it
>> does now ;)
>>
>> I really can't get past the parentheses.  I know Georg said it's an
>> excuse, but I really, truly cannot understand most Lisp code because I
>> can't tell which right paren out of a group of six is closing which
>> left paren.  I'm sure bracket highlighting in a code editor can help,
>> but why should that be necessary?  I'm sure a good deal of those
>> parens can be stripped out, or replaced by other brackets, or just
>> moved around to get a more algebraic syntax. 
> 
> I completely agree. Lisp has a terrible "Hello, World" problem. 

I understand I'm reaching fanboi status here, and I'll stop soon.  But:

# (print "Hello, World!")

doesn't seem too awful.

> The failure of Lisp to gain traction is a great demonstration of the
> importance of syntactic sugar. Poor old Lisp.

I don't think this is the primary reason.  As mentioned before, syntax is a
part of it, but so is the total power given to the programmer.  This power
leads to a lack of standard or cohesive libs, b/c it's so easy to make it
exactly the way you want it.  I imagine that if some of the D power users
wrapped themselves in Lisp for a while, they'd be able to do for themselves
what they beg Walter to do for them in D.

BA