Explanation of macros; Haskell macros

[Pascal Costanza]

Dave Harris wrote:

> mike420 at ziplip.com () wrote (abridged):
> 
>>I keep hearing good (or at least interesting) things about Smalltalk.
>>But back when I looked at it, I was really unimpressed by its 
>>community. The mood is generally like "Yeah, Smalltalk is dead,
>>let's finish the projects we are working on in Smalltalk and
>>move on". At least we, Lispers, are militant and aim for world
>>domination. This defeatism discouraged me from seriously studying 
>>Smalltalk.
> 
> 
> When was that? In recent years Smalltalk has acquired an ANSI standard, it 
> has several important new implementations (Squeak, Dolphin, S#), was the 
> birthplace of the Refactoring Browser and Extreme Programming. I'd say it 
> was pretty vibrant.

mike420 is a troll.

Apart from that it seems to me that many Smalltalkers have spent several 
years in the Java community, because "it's not _that_ bad", but now that 
they realize that "it _is_ _that_ bad" they are returning. ;)

>>In addition to short LAMBDA (is it shorter than "\" ?), what
>>interesting features does Smalltalk have that Lisp does *not* have?
> 
> I like it because of its concrete object model and syntax.
> 
> I realise Lisp lets you build just about any object model you want, but 
> this is an area where the cutting down of possibilities is helpful 
> (assuming Smalltalk matches what you want to do).

Why is it that computer science is the only field in which "cutting down 
possibilities" is considered to be "helpful"?!?


Pascal