The PostgreSQL docs, and source code, are an absolute shining star, in Open Source or otherwise. I'm hard pressed to think of a project that does it better, really.
What exactly do you mean? Macros seem like a good way to solve many of JavaScript's syntactic shortcomings while maintaining backwards-compatibility.
Now, macros do have some shortcomings. I've used Racket (a variant of Scheme) a fair bit, and I'm now very wary of using macros too much. However, when they are useful, I've found they're very useful: writing the same program in a language without macros would often be extremely awkward.
Of course, if you're willing to entertain radical changes to your language, you can get many of the benefits of macros with a minimalist syntax, laziness and a simple mechanism for controlling how statements get evaluated. Which ultimately just amounts to Haskell. And I've even found good use cases for macros in Haskell, albeit far less than in any other language.
One problem I see is that it helps creates more way to do basic things like declaring a class or a function. (There are already a number of different utility libraries for OO in JS).
Now imagine if every JS codebase use a slightly different convention for class/function declaration with slightly different behaviours. It can become a nightmare to understand even the most simple function definition, just because you don't this particular "def" has some side-effects.
Now, I agree that in some cases, macros can be useful and reduce the complexity of the program, but declaring classes and functions certainly isn't the best use case for them and it's a bit sad those are the two first examples on the page.
- debugging such code is a nightmare(node.js itself makes it hard enough)
- static analysis of such code is not possible.. yet?
JS and programmers should target Java-like experience imo, static analysis, code assist, dependency check - all of it performed on-the-fly. We won't get it by creating yet another layer above main language, because IDE vendors simply can't cope.
Javascript is a dynamic language. And especially one that is difficult to do static analysis on. We get much more out of macros than we would with some attempts at static analysis, when it comes to programmer productivity in the end.
100% agree. This whole "let's build another language/compiler" on top of JavaScript thing is starting to piss me off.
It's one of those things that just ends up in utterly huge amounts of excruciating pain with respect to performance, debugging, support, fungibility and value over a long period of time.
This way your designing process is limited to your HTML/CSS skills, while the point of being being good designer is to have no limits(except imagination)
