In which I mention that I like macros

Lest this blog be limited only to complaining about Lisp's shortcomings, allow me to take moment to sing the praises of macros, one of the greatest language features that's probably not even possible in other syntaxes.

Recently, I had to write a program to scrape a bunch of data off of a few thousand web pages. My general pattern was to skip forward until I found a certain string, then skip forward a bit more and grab whatever was between certain tags. It was also important to leave the cursor at the end of wherever I had searched, so that the next bit of data I scraped out would start looking at that point. This particular mutation made a function not terribly well suited to the task.

This came out to roughly ten lines of code per field searched for. But it was trivial to put those into a macro, and turn all my scrapes into something along the lines of (after-and-between phone "Phone:" "<b>" "<br").

The macro facility is one I especially miss when I'm programming Cusp (in Java, naturally). In the SwankInterface class, I have several dozen functions which all start with identical code to register a callback, and all end by calling a function to send a string to Swank. It's only 2 lines per function, but now that I'm used to Lisp, those lines annoy me. It's wasteful, and what if I have to change them someday?

Just one of the ways in which Lisp ruins other languages for you. CLOS makes things even worse.