/prague/ Q&A

Ask /prog/ anything.

Although don't expect an answer or even a good one.

Also, keep it /prog/ related.

>>47
I was referring to defmacro the macro-creation macro in Common Lisp, not defmacro the website. I don't know how accurate/good that page is because I have too much work to do and too little spare time to read it.

(Un)fortunately I am as Java-ignorant as anyone can be so any nuance or implication of the given examples went over my head. I feel like I'm right on the brink of getting it, but that last puzzle piece of understanding still looks like a corner when I've already completed in the border.

If you are truly new to programming, try reading SICP[1] or, if it's too rough, Land of Lisp[2], like I said before. And, of course, do at least some of the exercises as you go along.

Is this due to the flexibility and ease of debugging that was mentioned in the article, or am I missing something?

Programming is all about tradeoffs. Come to think of it, anything in the world is all about tradeoffs. When you code in C, you are trading off readability, security and terseness for that extra vroom vroom. When you code in Java, you trade off, uh, everything for (the illusion of) portability. When you code in Haskell, you trade off a lot of readability for (type) safety, theoretical purity, and terseness. Overusing functional programming can certainly lead to unreadable and/or unsafe and/or slow code, as would taking any one programming approach to be your hammer and pretending everything else is a nail (or in the case of C++, a thumb).

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
[2] http://landoflisp.com/