How to discourage macros: disable automerge of General registry PRs?

[ctkelley]

I think using macros is pretty much self-discouraging. I tried it once and found it hard enough that I rethought the problem and did it another way. I would be very surprised if I needed to do it for the things I work on.

I very much appreciate things like @btime, @floop, @batch, and @printf while being completely aware that I’m unlikely to ever be able to do stuff like that on my own.

I figure that any package that abuses macros will likely attract very few users and go away on its own.

[giordano]

@ctkelley

I think using macros is pretty much self-discouraging. I tried it once and found it hard enough that I rethought the problem and did it another way. I would be very surprised if I needed to do it for the things I work on.

The point of my blogpost

My first macro in Julia

was exactly to show that macros can be very nice to use on the user side, but are often quite hard on the developer side: there are lots of pitfalls to take care of, I’m sure I forgot something in the post. Still, it can be useful to get familiar with how they work.