> Knowing that certain powerful features of programming languages can be used to create unmaintanable code, do we ban those features or do we try to harness them by using a disciplined approach to software design?
Discipline never works unless it's enforced. So the only hope is to figure out "less powerful" versions of those features that cover all their important use cases without permitting unmaintainable code. Fortunately, modern programming language design has gotten pretty good at that: 95% of the killer use cases you'd see as macro examples in Lisp advocacy 20 years ago are now ordinary, standard-ish programming language features.
> If you have those features within the programming language they tend to get overused. If you don't have them within the programming language, they get tacked on in some inconsistent, half-assed way as soon as the need for frameworks, DSLs or sophisiticated configuration arises.
That's a possible failure mode, but we've been pretty good at moving away from it IME. The best modern languages do manage to walk the fine line between a language that's too constrained to do anything in without some magic addon and a language that's unmaintainably flexible in the language proper.
Discipline never works unless it's enforced. So the only hope is to figure out "less powerful" versions of those features that cover all their important use cases without permitting unmaintainable code. Fortunately, modern programming language design has gotten pretty good at that: 95% of the killer use cases you'd see as macro examples in Lisp advocacy 20 years ago are now ordinary, standard-ish programming language features.
> If you have those features within the programming language they tend to get overused. If you don't have them within the programming language, they get tacked on in some inconsistent, half-assed way as soon as the need for frameworks, DSLs or sophisiticated configuration arises.
That's a possible failure mode, but we've been pretty good at moving away from it IME. The best modern languages do manage to walk the fine line between a language that's too constrained to do anything in without some magic addon and a language that's unmaintainably flexible in the language proper.