Thanks for sharing your experience with Ruby templates and for the links.
> I don't think the power/danger tradeoff is worth it.
The power/danger tradeoff might not be worth it for the overwhelming majority of programs. For some kinds of programs I don't see how this power can be got with anything less powerful than macros.
I appreciate and I'm impressed you're gratuitously positive.
I think you mean within reasonable programs that's not a metric that matters because most programs solve problems that don't need much autogeneration to be solved. For problems that do need autogeneration macros are one of the strongest ways.
A good way to become convinced of the power of macros is to try and write a web app in Arc to generate lots of HTML.
IDEs that generate a lot of the code are proof macros are needed because when you want to change the autogenerated code you have to do it by hand. Autogeneration can be done with macros and is simpler with macros.
> we chose our goal to be achieving multi-master replication with Async consistency. We believe that this approach strikes the best balance of fault tolerance and transaction throughput.
> I don't think the power/danger tradeoff is worth it.
The power/danger tradeoff might not be worth it for the overwhelming majority of programs. For some kinds of programs I don't see how this power can be got with anything less powerful than macros.