"Functions, macros, they're just ways to get certain behavior in the most readable way possible."
Sure. And their behavior is different: macros/vaus don't evaluate their arguments, functions do. That's because they're used for different purposes, so distinguishing between them is important and/or useful.
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"Perhaps they add mental overhead in kernel because it's concerned about hygiene and such abstract matters."
I don't see what hygiene has to do with it... we're discussing about making it easy to tell at a glance whether a particular variable is a function or a vau, that's all. That's true regardless of whether the vau is hygienic or not.
I'll also note that I have not actually programmed in Kernel, so all my talk about "mental overhead" is actually referring to Arc, which is a distinctly unhygienic language.
In any case, my gut says that making a distinction between vaus and functions is important, so that's what I'm doing.
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"Wanting to track your macros is OCD like wanting to avoid namespace pollution is OCD. Just relax, use what you need, remove what you don't need, and the function/macro distinction will fade into the background."
I do indeed worry about namespaces, which is why my language is going to have fantastic namespace support, most likely built on top of first-class environments.
Not only does this allow people to write solid libraries that don't need to worry about collisions, but it also has the massively major benefit that you know exactly what a variable refers to, because each module can be studied in isolation. You can't do that when everything is in one namespace.
So this has the same benefits that lexical scope and referential transparency give you: you can study different subparts of the system in isolation without worrying about what another part is doing.
Incidentally, that's why dynamic scope is so bad: it's not enough to understand what a single function is doing, you also need to understand what the rest of the program is doing, because some other random part of the program might change the dynamic variable.
That's why "lexical by default, marking certain variables as dynamic" is superior to "dynamic by default": it increases locality because you don't need to jump around everywhere trying to figure out what everything does, you can just focus on one part of the system at a time.
That's the whole point of functional programming, and my language is intentionally designed as a functional language. In fact, I plan for all the built-in data types to be immutable as well, for the exact same reasons. This should also help immensely with concurrency, similar to Clojure.
"I'll also note that I have not actually programmed in Kernel, so all my talk about "mental overhead" is actually referring to Arc, which is a distinctly unhygienic language."
That is really interesting, that our respective experiences are so different.
I'm with you on "lexical by default" -- I'm not totally crazy :) But the simplest possible mechanism that provides the similar advantages of namespaces is to just warn when a variable conflict is detected, when a global is defined for a second time.
I'm trying hard to introspect here, and I think the difference between lexical scope and namespaces for me is that when I'm programming by myself I don't need a second namespace, but I do still find dynamic scope to be error-prone. My entire belief system stems from that, that one should program as if one was working alone. Everything that helps that is good, anything that isn't needed is chaff.
