[plt-scheme] What is all the fuss about how you can write DSLs in Lisp?

Hi Grant,

That's kinda a large, open question.

Bill Clementson posted a whole screencast that dances around this
question some time ago:

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/050711.html

Actually, Paul Graham's "Beating the Average" is another story about
LISP and DSLs (sorta, mostly, ish):

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

If those don't start you on the road to answering your question, or
you want to know more, I recommend diving into places like
readscheme.org or the ACM Digital Library. Read about how the macro
systems work and the kinds of things you can do with them. Then, think
about how you'd do the same thing in Language X, and you're 90% there.
(There are people on this list who could point you to more specific
papers, but if you're completely at a loss as to why the Lisp family
of languages are so powerful for this kind of work, then those papers
won't help you at this stage, I suspect.)

My apologies if you were asking a more subtle question. However, it
seems like you are new to  hygenic macro systems and the language
family in general.

Cheers,
Matt



On 6/7/07, Grant Rettke <grettke at acm.org> wrote:
> What is all the fuss about how you can write DSLs in Lisp?
>
> Everyone from thought-leaders to blog-posters to grandma's are talking
> about how Lisp is so great for DSLs.
>
> About what are these people talking about? Because no one of said
> people actually elaborate on any of this, of course, which leads me to
> question their claims.
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