once again I fucking hate dtolnay for blocking reflection in rust so that his macro work doesn't become obsolete

d@nny "disc@" mc²

@ireneista @aud @jonny i didn't know about it at all until a few months ago and i felt incredibly upset and disillusioned

Irenes (many)

@aud yepppppppp.

Charles U. Farley

@aud I haven't done any macro programming at all. Some of the template stuff. I hate that it looks too much like C++. There are even some false friends, which I think is objectively bad.

Irenes (many)

@hipsterelectron @aud @jonny it is upsetting and disillusioning for sure

this was by no means the only topic on our mind when we wrote https://irenes.space/leaves/2024-09-29-technology-community-idealism but it was in there

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] I like how #chapelLang handles this type of stuff (back when I was writing more of it, which was a while ago admittedly); at the time, your serialization/deserialization stuff was the same stuff used to print to stdout, for instance, so you didn't have to write multiple variants...

Like one does with Debug and serde.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] I really dislike macros for a lot of reasons, but that's my core reason: they can make it substantially more difficult to figure out what the hell is going on unless A. you can read the macro, and/or B. read the intermediate (which is obviously not available until you attempt to compile).

Not that I think the idea of metaprogramming or whatever it's called is bad, but that I think rust's model is.

Irenes (many)

@aud sigh Lisp "solved" this problem 70 years ago

except not really because we still have the problem and hardly anybody uses Lisp

it's frustrating how it keeps coming up

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] So, yeah, I'm annoyed that not only is Rust the first time I've had to write macros (rather than writing thousands of line of difficult to maintain boilerplate) but that it just so happens to be championed by one of the preeminent garbage fuckers in tech.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] alright, this is very validating and I appreciate it, hah. People bang on about how great serde is and yeaaaah it's certainly the tool in use, isn't it, but. is it great? It fills a niche but does that mean it's good.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] fuck it, gonna create a makefile for my project that calls a bash script that generates rust code through extensive use of sed then calls cargo.

/s ...

... or am I.

Irenes (many)

@aud very welcome. we're glad that our thirty years studying the theory and practice of parsing is good for a real problem, which is to say an emotional problem

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] Rust's macros are also rather limited; for instance, you want to do something like, say, I dunno, copy trait/fields from one struct to another? Guess what: no, not without substantial duplication of effort. You can't create a macro that includes a different struct/etc that you're calling this from. So now you're stuck with boilerplate code, except it's handwritten in your macro function (which, whatever, fine, I guess) except now it's not type checked because it cannot be.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] I have so many emotions about programming and practices and the people involved : D

d@nny "disc@" mc²

@aud @jonny @ireneista would like it if our choice of mongers were a bit wider than war fish and cheese

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] gonna start monging some peace and love. fuckers beware.

d@nny "disc@" mc²

@aud @ireneista i used make for coffeescript stuff in college, be the change

d@nny "disc@" mc²

@aud @ireneista also awk is probably more useful for code generation, the rapist defending crypto guy has an assembler in awk

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] (I actually had written awk before but remembered I barely know how to use it)