Most people don’t realize that writing a compiler like this is only about 2 months work for one talented person who read the Dragon book. Since the compiler only has one body of code to compile, it is much easier to write. It doesn’t have to be a general-purpose compiler. It doesn’t have a math library, for example.

And we have the ability to add any feature to the language that we want easily… this is the same power Paul Graham talks about in On Lisp, the power to invent new language features that suit your exact application domain. Lisp does this through a mechanism called macros.

— Wasabi

— Joel on Software

— Joel Spolsky

2012.06.20 Wednesday ACHK