Comment by Zababa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zababa | Hacker News Reader

> And macros are definitely evidence of techniques that go beyond glue programming. For example, solving problems by first writing a language for problems of that type, and then writing your specific application in it.

Is this fundamentally different from "writing your own library to solve a problem, and then using it"?

> So if you want to expand your concept of what programming can be, one way to do it is by learning weird languages.

Isn't the conclusion here "contribute to/write your own libraries" rather than "pick a weird language"? Or "solve problems from scratch instead of relying on libraries when learning"? I feel like the "weird languages" are shoehorned into a discussion about glue programming vs library programming.

You can express things with macros that you can not with normal code. But with the advent of decorators and templates that gap has shrunk, and with C++ templates for example. It might almost be possible to do everything with templates that you can do with macros. That code might end up looking weird though.

> Isn't the conclusion here "contribute to/write your own libraries"

If you write your own library for a popular language, you're both competing with everyone else who has written a library to do the same thing and picking fights with those who just want tell you to not reinvent the wheel.

The article is mostly about learning. When learning, it's fine to do things people already did. I don't like the expression "reinventing the wheel". I don't know much about engineering, but I think most of our job as developers would be closer to finding a wheel for a specific case, mostly by adapting existing solutions to fit our use case, and sometimes designing a wheel form the ground up.

In serious engineering wheels are reinvented everywhere, but somehow in software you're supposed to use existing parts that do 90% of what you need and then struggle with the remaining 10%.

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