Pablo Fernandez

Tag: macros

  • Macros, the Lisp advantage

    Macros, the Lisp advantage

    Learning about macros in Lisps was one of my biggest whoa-moments in my programming career and since then I’ve given presentations about them to audiences ranging from 1 to 100 people. I have a little script that I follow in which I implement a custom form of the if-conditional. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ve managed…

  • Why I love Lisp

    This post was extracted from a small talk I gave at Simplificator, where I work, titled “Why I love Smalltalk and Lisp”. There’s another post titled “Why I love Smalltalk” published before this one. Lisp is an old language. Very old. Today there are many Lisps and no single language is called Lisp today. Actually,…

  • Lisp macros feel like cheating

    Common Lisp macros feel like cheating. I’ve reached chapter 9 of Practical Common Lisp, where the goal is to build a unit test framework, and you can see right away how the patterns are easily abstracted out with macros. It’s so easy it feels like cheating. Getting a text representation of the test code to…