Why Lisp macros are cool, a Perl perspective (2005)

Source filters are bad because you get a string and parse it yourself and then get it wrong for edge cases. What if Perl already parsed a piece of source for you and handed you a data structure instead? That fixes the greatest shortcoming. Solution 1: B::Deparse <http://yapceurope.lv/ye2011/talk/3597>, <http://act.yapc.eu/gpw2014/talk/5266> Solution 2: B::CallChecker / <http://perldoc.perl.org/perlapi.html#cv_set_call_checker> In other words, you do have access to the parser. It's not as neat as in Lisp because of…

The author wrote „Higher Order Perl“ which — to my knowledge — is one of the best books on programming ever written. While it’s got Perl in its title it is really an exhaustive introduction to the functional programming paradigm while being refreshingly non-academic about the subject. BTW: In general, I think there were many great Perl book authors having written very insightful introductory text books. They were mostly fun too read and taught me more about computer science than…

Even for those who don't need to be sold on Lisp macros, that was worth reading just for this sentence (in reference to C++ macros): I forgot what rabid programming language fans are like; they can and will defend any system, no matter how dysfunctional, as long as it's _their_ dysfunctional sytem. :-)

How did this wind up here? For the original, go to http://plover.com:8080/~alias/list.cgi?2:mss:234:200507:hokn... and see the discussion we had about it then. It is also worth noting that MJD has the distinction of being the highest rated speaker at Oscon ever. If there is any possibility of interest, he is worth watching because he is incredibly informative. See http://perl.plover.com/ for some of his older Perl writings.