What is boilerplate? and why is Lisp so good at reducing it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944641

by morphir • 17 years ago

2 7 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What exactly is boilerplate? and why is Lisp so good at reducing it?

hxa7241• 17 years ago

Boilerplate is an implicit abstraction: recognisable generality, but lacking a coded mechanism.

These could always be manually transformed to fit standard abstractions, such as functions or classes. But Lisp's macro facility instead allows them to be captured more 'directly'.

Now, whether fewer standardised abstractions is better/worse than more various tailored abstractions, is a deeper question . . .

DanielStraight• 17 years ago

A perfect example is Java's getters and setters, which follow a completely regular pattern but still have to be coded individually.

wgj2• 17 years ago

This wikipedia entry is a decent introduction, discussing pros and cons of repetition-reducing abstractions (DRY) in a language-independent way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dont_repeat_yourself

morphir2• 17 years ago

your link doesn't work. Try this one instead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself I was not aware there was a term for this. Also called DIE (Duplication is Evil).

morphir2• 17 years ago

I initially thought recursion where less cpu intensive than traditional for-loops. Is this even true?

chromatic• 17 years ago

No one can answer that question accurately without discussing specific implementations of specific programming languages.

What is boilerplate? and why is Lisp so good at reducing it?

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