alt Hacker NewsWhat I meant by that is the metaprogramming capabilities that often get cited for allowing devs to create their own domain specific "mini languages". To me that's a "creative" way to write code because the end result could be wildly different depending on who's doing the writing. And creativity invites over-engineering, over-abstraction, and hidden costs. That's what I meant by the "opposite of boring".
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You linked me to this comment from another one and I have to agree with this sentiment.
Creating these mini DSLs is something that requires a lot of thought and good design. There is a danger here as you pointed out sharply.
But I have some caveats and counter examples:
I would say the danger is greater when using macros and far less dangerous when using data DSLs. The Clojure community has been moving towards the latter since a while.
There are some _very good_ examples of (data-) DSLs provided by libraries, such as hiccup (and derived libraries), reitit, malli, honeysql, core match, spec and the datalog flavor of Clojure come to mind immediately (there are more that I forget).
In many cases they can even improve performance, because they can optimize what you put into them behind the scenes.
In practice, though, most developers don’t do that.
There’s a rule of thumb: write a macro as a last resort.
It’s not hard to stick to it. In general, you can go a long, long way with HOFs, transducers, and standard macros before a hand-rolled macro would serve you better.
I read comments like these in bewilderment.
Have you worked for a company that hasn’t created its own, as you put it “mini language”?
Have you worked for a company that doesn’t indulge in over engineering, over abstraction and hidden cost?
Do you actually do programming for a job at all?