M4

Raised as a usability problem by 6 people on Hacker News over 5 years (2018–2022), in 4 threads.

People raised many different problems with M4, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 6 complaints

Hard to debug, with convoluted rules and everything written as macros2022-12-28
Its syntax is quite annoying to use2021-07-29
Hard to operate and fails when used beyond simple macro processing2021-07-29
Clunky and unfriendly to use, requiring wizard-level expertise2020-06-19
Could never get the M4 scripts to do what the user wanted2018-08-18
Debugging M4 errors is atrocious, e.g. syntax errors are hard to diagnose2018-08-18