Subject: Re: macros vs HOFs (was: O'Caml) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 12 Sep 2002 20:44:52 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3240852292130093@naggum.no> * Gareth McCaughan | They are ugly so that your code can be beautiful. This is a frequently misunderstood point. A lot of programmers who get transfixed by some blinding elegance never understand that what they have to work with is elegant because a lot of the dirty details have been wiped under the carpet. They sort of get this requirement that from this point onward, /all/ code must be "elegant". I have come to believe that elegance, to be achieved where it did not previously exist, you must do a lot of hard, dirty work. The simpler and more elegant you want the abstraction to be, the more time and effort you must expend on its fundamentals and its implementation. -- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.