Discovered: Jan 24, 2023 08:04 The Third Bit · Software Design by Example 15: Code Generator <– The Glamorous toolkit based on Pharo (Smalltalk) sounds fabulous! –> QUOTE: Tools like this are hard to build for languages like JavaScript because the source code as written is very different from the data structure that represents it in memory. The greatest strength of languages like Scheme is that these two representations are much more closely aligned, which makes this kind of metaprogramming much easier—once you get over the hurdle of typing in parse trees. As noted yesterday, the overwhelming majority of programmers still prefer not to do this sixty years after Lisp syntax was invented and despite decades of use in education. I used to believe that programmers would one day switch from punchcard-compatible programming tools to ones that separated models from views, but I no longer expect to see that in my lifetime. It’s a shame—experiments like the Glamorous Toolkit make programming with lines of text look as antiquated as chiseling hieroglyphics onto stone tablets—but even with this self-imposed clumsiness, I still believe that beautiful is possible.

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