Re: my latest blog post

[Catonano]

Mark,

2018-06-07 19:03 GMT+02:00 Mark H Weaver <address@hidden>:

I appreciate you sharing your thoughts on this.  I wanted to apologize
for making you feel badly; it honestly was not my intent to shame you in
any way.

Thank you for your kind and measured words

I appreciate both the tone and the content of your reply

I am very reassured by your statement that you find my quuestions about macro expansion reasonable and legitimate

My feeling was not positive and I'm only happy of having been wrong

 

To be honest, I felt a bit defensive when you seemed to contradict my
claim that 'macroexpand-1' would be difficult to implement in a modern
Hygienic macro expander, when you pointed to the Racket documentation
and asked (possibly rhetorically) whether Racket had hygienic macros.
What felt to you like "slight shaming" might have been somehow related
to my feeling defensive about this.

I see

On my side, I was a bit adversary because I feel that a macro stepper is a fundamental feature of a scheme system and in Guile it's less than an afterthought

I understand that implementing it is too much work

But I think that the manual should at least mention macro stepping as a missing feature, it should mention the internal APIs that you indicated in that thread and the uncertainties around them

What I want to convey is that the user shouldn't be left in the dark about macro stepping

On the bright side, after this discussion, I offer to contribute a paragraph for the manual where the macro stepping missing feature is discussed

It will still be a missing feature, but at least the user will know what she needs to know

I'd use the enlightening example you provided, the warings you raised and the notions contained in the paragraph about the syntax helpers

Probably the part that's not about syntax helpers should be pulled out from there and integrated in the new paragraph

 

My lack of response until now to your most recent message in that thread
was not because my "patience was exhausted", as you wrote, but only
because I'm stretched far too thin, and I haven't yet figured out how to
respond to your last message.

I simply don't have enough time for all of the things I'd like to do, so
many important things get dropped on the floor.  I respond to user
questions and bug reports sporadically, when I have the time and energy
to do so.  It's nothing personal.

I'm so relieved in learning you didn´t shrug it

Someone else made me notice that the lack of an answer can't always be interpeted as an aggression, as I did in my post.

I did, indeed.

The lack of an answer hits me, admittedly

I apologize for being emotional about this

 

For what it's worth, I think that your line of questions about
'macroexpand-1' was perfectly reasonable, and neither worthy of shame
nor of feeling like an idiot.  The details of modern macro expanders are
quite difficult, and I suspect that even seasoned Scheme hackers rarely
understand them in depth.

     Regards,
       Mark

thanks