[Gllug] re: OSS CMSs

[Nix]

On Fri, 29 Apr 2005, David Damerell suggested tentatively:
> On Thursday, 28 Apr 2005, Nix wrote:
>>On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, David Damerell yowled:
>>>                       The extra vocabulary in a real language
>>>expresses subtle differences of meaning; but a programming language is
>>>dealing with a definite set of fundamental operations; the redundancy
>>>being discussed is extra vocabulary that really does mean exactly the
>>>same thing as existing vocabulary.
>>So you're not in favour of Lisp macros, then?
> 
> Certainly it's possible to use them in a way that diminishes
> readability, which is all I'm saying here.

But the problem you're complaining about is that using differing subsets
of a language that others might not be familiar with makes it harder for
those others to understand the code.

Surely this is true whether or not it is a good choice of language subset,
and whether or not the subset is one you've defined yourself?

(Indeed, if the subset *is* one you've defined yourself, it just makes
that much more certain that any newcomer to the code will be unable to
understand it!)

This is of course fixable by coming up with a good, expressive, and
comprehensible subset --- but that's language design, and is famously
hard to do well.

But possibly I'm too jaundiced by my day job, dealing with a world of
commercial `programmers' who often can't even functionally decompose
competently (or at all), let alone pick good names for those functions.
If they used a language with a good macro system, God only knows what
havoc they'd wreak. (Sometimes I wish *they'd* decompose so they'd stop
making my codebase decompose.)

I think I'm really looking for a powerful language --- and legally
mandated training wheels that block most of its more powerful components
from 90% of the world's `developers'. Or something like the
accreditation program engineers have. (`No, you can't call yourself a
software developer. You only know one language and don't understand how
to use it properly. NEXT!')

-- 
This is like system("/usr/funky/bin/perl -e 'exec sleep 1'");
   --- Peter da Silva
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