[racket] Plea for neologism (was: Re: letoverlambda)

These two threads remind me of an observation that I wish I could cite:

"Debugging programs is harder than writing programs. Those who write programs at the limits of their ability are unqualified to debug them."

In this case: "Macros are harder to understand than fundamental programming. Those who use macros at the limits of their ability are unqualified to talk about them."

So, why are new words needed? 

rac



In this case
On Nov 23, 2010, at 12:08 PM, John Clements wrote:

> 
> On Nov 20, 2010, at 6:58 PM, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Nov 20, 2010, at 9:01 PM, Greg Hendershott wrote:
>> 
>>> But I didn't get the
>>> impression that all or even most of the macro techniques were
>>> unhygienic. 
>> 
>> 
>> Hygiene is a technical term. The idea is roughly that 
>> the __macro system__ (as a whole) should respect the 
>> lexical structure of your program. That is, by default
>> no programmer should be able to accidentally write a 
>> macro that messes up lexical bindings in a subtle way. 
> 
> Dave Herman mentioned this to me some time ago, and my immediate response was this: okay, if the term "hygiene" refers to a macro system and not to a macro, then *what word* should we use to describe macros that violate transparency? "non-transparent"?
> 
> John
> 
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