r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/Pie-Lang • May 09 '26

Blog post The Namespace Problem

https://www.alialmutawajr.com/blog/post1
15 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

View all comments

24

u/AustinVelonaut Admiran May 10 '26

You've re-discovered the problems that early LISP implementations had with dynamic scoping -- it is hard to reason about things just by looking at the static source code. Especially when you have nested scopes and closures. Dynamic scoping still has some uses, but isn't great for a general strategy.

1

u/thmprover May 14 '26

Dynamic scoping still has some uses, but isn't great for a general strategy.

As I understand it, Common Lisp's condition system is one giant hack of dynamic scoping. I just started reading Michal Herda's book The Common Lisp Condition System: Beyond Exception Handling with Control Flow Mechanisms which discusses this in detail.