"Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead."

[JN]

On Friday, 3 May 2019 at 02:25:47 UTC, Mike Franklin wrote:
> This is actually what I like about D:  It is so powerful, it 
> allows users to make whatever abstraction is ideal for their 
> use case.  What I'd like to see is for D to capitalize more on 
> that.

So does Lisp. And one of the main criticism of Lisp is that every 
programmer invents their own programming language features and 
it's very hard to reuse code or libraries because everything is 
written in different style.

Remember Lisp curse 
http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

" Lisp allows you to just chuck things off so easily, and it is 
easy to take this for granted. I saw this 10 years ago when 
looking for a GUI to my Lisp. No problem, there were 9 different 
offerings. The trouble was that none of the 9 were properly 
documented and none were bug free. Basically each person had 
implemented his own solution and it worked for him so that was 
fine."

"Some smug Lisp-lovers have surveyed the current crop of academic 
languages (Haskell, Ocaml, et cetera) and found them wanting, 
saying that any feature of theirs is either already present in 
Lisp or can be easily implemented — and improved upon — with Lisp 
macros. They're probably right."

"The Lisp Curse kicks in. Every second or third serious Lisp 
hacker will roll his own implementation of lazy evaluation, 
functional purity, arrows, pattern matching, type inferencing, 
and the rest. Most of these projects will be lone-wolf 
operations. Thus, they will have eighty percent of the features 
that most people need (a different eighty percent in each case). 
They will be poorly documented. They will not be portable across 
Lisp systems. "

replace Lisp with D in these quotes and it sounds interesting :)