Karsten Schmidt on Nostr: I never read the curse as a general judgement about the language nor that it says ...

I never read the curse as a general judgement about the language nor that it says claims that it's impossible to create software using best practices and with an aim to be legible/maintainable by a large(r) group of people. But I think more niche languages like Lisp & Forth (and others) which also provide above average expressive control (incl. over syntax features) are very appealing & tempting to a certain lone wolf mindset which can quickly lead to the curse. Just like LLM usage, expressiveness/productivity at all costs can be addictive, and these two langs (Lisp & Forth) make it particularly easy to go after it and stop caring about social/interop aspects.

I remember many discussions on the Clojure mailing lists about overuse of macros & DSLs in some projects, not just because of composition or maintenance issues, but also that macros are much harder to debug and they're quickly leading to undecipherable black box code. Again, not necessarily an issue if one just builds stuff for an audience of one, but to me that's exactly what the curse is also about: Using single-user designs/techniques to build software which is then supposed to be rolled out to many and then the problems start...

tante (npub1j8v…ld5q)