[ilc09-attendees] The Great Macro Debate: Are Macros a Menace?

[Daniel Weinreb]

Lisp's macro facility allows powerful abstraction and extensibility.
It has been used for domain-specific languages, and adding such
language improvements as object-oriented programming.

Nevertheless, macros have been criticized on several grounds, usually
stemming from their being too powerful and their potential to create
code that is hard to understand.

On Monday evening at 20:00, we will have a debate on the merits and
drawbacks of Lisp macros, by a group of very experienced experts.

            "Are Macros a Menace?"

        Yes: Jeremy Brown, seconded by Richard Gabriel

         No: Pascal Costanza, seconded by Guy Steele

            Moderator: Dan Weinreb

Jeremy Brown, has a Ph.D. from M.I.T.  He was one of the architects of
the new airline reservation system being built at ITA Software.  His
new company is Rep Invariant.

Pascal Costanza has a Ph.D. degree from the University of Bonn,
Germany, and works as a research assistant at the Programming
Technology Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.

Guy Steele has a Ph.D. from M.I.T.  He is a Sun Fellow for Sun
Microsystems Laboratories, working on the Programming Language
Research project.

Richard Gabriel has a Ph.D. from Stanford.  He is a Distinguished
Engineer at IBM Research.

-- Dan Weinreb, General Chair

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________________________________________
Daniel Weinreb
http://danweinreb.org/blog/
Lisp: The Next 50 Years:  http://ilc09.org