[NateEag]

Once you have grokked Lisp, everything else feels weak by comparison, as I understand it.

Mostly the appeal is how easy it is to extend the syntax (because there is barely any syntax at all).

Disclaimer: I have written a good hunk of Emacs Lisp and also written Scheme professionally, but I have yet to grok macros.

[collyw]

Never used Lisp, but this sounds like a case of offering you loads of cool stuff when writing new code, which in turn will make debugging the code an absolute nightmare. This is based on my experience with mixed metaphor languages like Python. You can do some clever stuff like generating functions dynamically and passing them around, but when you need to debug these bits of code they can be a nightmare. Does Lisp improve on this in any way?

[NateEag]

I believe that macros can increase the complexity of debugging.

However, I believe they're much more debuggable than dynamically-generated functions in most languages. There's another layer of translation from your baseline code, but due to the nature of macros, you can usually just step right into them and see the expanded, generated macro code, if my rusty memories of debugging elisp are correct.

Here's one person reading about Common Lisp's debugging infrastructure, FWIW.