About Dylan

I've written some time ago that Dylan felt deeply wrong to me, although I had a hard time explaining exactly why:

Finally, in the algol+macro category, the case of Dylan has to be mentioned. I have a bad feeling about this language, but I can't spot why exactly. That would be worth a separate post.

I've recently read someone make the case much better than I could, on the LL1 discussion list: Drew Withehouse on Dylan.

To that, I'd just add a lesser peeve: Dylan macros are supposed to be programmed in a very declarative subset of Dylan, so the language and the metalanguage aren't quite the same *in practice*. This feels philosophically wrong to me, although I'm not sure about its factual consequences.

Besides, I'm happy to notice that metalua fits the description of the ultimate language made in this post: double syntax approach, no mandatory fancy IDE, REPL, powerful yet unobtrusive module system... The main part still missing is standard libs in the distro. The next versions are evolving in that direction, and I'm eagerly waiting for luarocks to mature!