What are AST Macros?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, July 13, 2010 12:00:45 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:op.vfsn2hvweav7ka at localhost.localdomain...
> 
> > Just for fun, how would you define a serious language?
> > 
> > 1. Major major websites use it (facebook is one example, there are many
> > more).
> > 2. There are lots of books about it.
> > 3. people make serious money doing it, not just play money.
> > 4. major IDEs support it (I use netbeans, and probably would be lost
> > without it).
> > 5. The documentation is complete and well written.
> > 6. It supports interfaces to many major technologies (many databases,
> > apache, pdf, etc.)
> 
> For me, there'd be two criteria (in no order):
> 
> 1. Useful
> 2. Doesn't suck
> 
> :)

Arguably, _every_ computer language sucks - if nothing else because the 
designers of each and every language had to make decisions with pros and cons, 
and they aren't omniscient, so they're bound to have made mistakes of some 
variety in the language design. The real questions are how well the language 
does what you're trying to do and how close it operates to how you think.

Depending on what you're doing, any particular language could be fantastic or it 
could be horrible. And there are always drawbacks of some kind no matter _what_ 
you do. So, really, they all suck. It's more a question of which sucks the least 
than which doesn't suck.

Personally, I find that D is the closest to what I'm looking for in a language, 
and I think that it's the best language out there. But it's by no means perfect, 
and it never will be no matter how much Walter, Andrei, et al work on it. Every 
language has problems and that's not going to change. If nothing else, there are 
just too many places in computing where there are tradeoffs.

- Jonathan M Davis