[adrusi]

When you design a eDSL out of functions you get a lot of expressive power for free because you can lean on the host language's composition facilities. However this also means you have to shoehorn your semantics into an existing set of constraints (this is addressed by the "If possible" qualifier in "If possible, do things without macros") and you have to adopt all the complexity that the host language enables.

One big advantage of a DSL is that it limits complexity so that it's easier to predict what code will do, even if you haven't read it yet. With a macro-based DSL, you can know exactly what functionalty expressed in the DSL can and cannot do, which makes it easier to reason about without studying the code for hours.