Ripping this apart is completely welcome, since I don't have much experience with hygienic macros. Whenever I try to use syntax-rules, I find myself frustrated by how much less straightforward it feels than simple quasiquote macros. I'm likely just ignorant, or else I need http://www.rntz.net/post/intuitive-hygienic-macros.html.
You're probably preaching to the choir here. I have only violent agreement to add. Purity is not perfection in this regard[1].
It isn't about small codebases vs large ones, but small teams vs large ones. If you were to gradually accumulate 150k lines of code over the next 5 years I think you would probably be ok - as long as it was just you and a couple of friends. We need constraints when we don't know who we work with, when we can't choose our collaborators.
[1] Maybe in any regard? Perhaps we need a programming correctness movement to parallel political correctness. Oops, did I just Godwin this thread? :)
"violent agreement" conjures up a great image, like a SuperBowl riot in the city of the winning team. ;) </silliness>
> It isn't about small codebases vs large ones, but small teams vs large ones. If you were to gradually accumulate 150k lines of code over the next 5 years I think you would probably be ok - as long as it was just you and a couple of friends. We need constraints when we don't know who we work with, when we can't choose our collaborators.
That's a great point! Even though programmers change a lot over time, we still remain relatively backwards-compatible. And even when we do find code we previously wrote to be completely unusable, there is a sort of justice about it that doesn't exist when you're cursed by someone else's legacy code.
> Perhaps we need a programming correctness movement to parallel political correctness.
Not sure what you mean by this. Like to remove the assumption that purity is positive from mainstream programming thought?
