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0 pointsgiraffe_lady5mo ago0 comments

Frameworks in langauges that don't use macros have this problem too that's what I was getting at with the DSL vs API thing. I don't want to litigate the worthiness of macros for a given purpose here. But if you don't use them for this you have to use something for this the problem doesn't go away.

Wherever rails or phoenix has macro-defined syntax to handle a specific task, laravel or whatever will have a collection of related functions that need to be used in very specific ways to accomplish the same thing. Whether this collection is a "class" with an "api" or whether it is a "language" defined around this "domain" you will have the abstraction and the complexity.

Having a preference for one approach of managing this abstraction & complexity seems fine but "a collection of DSLs" is pretty much what a web framework is so that can't be the problem here.

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zdragnar5mo ago

It really depends on how good your inspecting tools are. Using runtime methods and functions instead of macros mean the code is all right there, and what you're debugging is what you see in your editor (setting aside silly things like reflection shenanigans).

With macros, even language servers may need customization if they introduce new syntax. The code that runs doesn't exist until it runs, so you can't see it ahead of time.

This doesn't sound like too big a problem if you're familiar with the tooling already, but trying to figure out where some random method comes from in a rails code base when you're new to Ruby is somewhere between a nightmare and impossible without debugging and using the repl to tell you where the source is.

React has a JSX macro, and I love using it, so there's definitely room for them. There is a world of difference in developer experience when macros are used versus when not, however, and it is wrong to say that it is all the same.

cess115mo ago

The counterpart in Laravel or Spring Boot or whatever would be annotations. As I understand it, that's how they're doing things on the .NET side too.

It's kind of the standard way to paper over the protocol grit of HTTP and make people able to quickly pump out fresh plumbing between outbound socket and database.

bmitc5mo ago

> Frameworks in langauges that don't use macros have this problem too that's what I was getting at with the DSL vs API thing.

You mean in the sense that the language's built-in syntax and available abstractions get abused so much that it approximates a DSL?

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