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Why Java Won't Have Macros

Posted by timothy on from the they-don't-mix-with-the-beans dept.

bugbear writes "Carlos Perez has just posted a page that quotes Sun Java 'theologist' Gilad Bracha about why there is no plan to add macros (in the Lisp sense) to Java."

1 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting point. by alyosha1 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The single best measure of whether a programming language is worth using is: how well does it support communities.
    This point doesn't seem to get raised very often when comparing the relative merits of language A against language B. It's easy to forget that while a language is a tool for communicating with a computer, it is also (and arguably more importantly) a tool for communicating with other programmers.

    Which is why Python is rapidly becoming my favourite language. I find other people's python code far easier to understand than stuff written in other languages. This despite the fact that I've only been hacking python for a few months, and I've been using C++ and other languages daily for several years.

    I feel that there's scope for yet another 'methodology', alongside OO and XP and all that - it might be called 'code as conversation', whereby the quality of a piece of code is judged by how readily it communicates intent to other programmers.