[deckard1]

> macro hygiene in itself is a solution looking for a problem

No. Unless you're not familiar with Lisp-1 vs Lisp-2. In Scheme, you would have to GENSYM every variable in addition to every function you call within a macro. Whereas in Common Lisp you just need to GENSYM the variables. That's the real reason Scheme doesn't use DEFMACRO.

I'm not personally a fan of any hygienic macro system because learning a new language defeats the purpose and elegance of Lisp macros in the first place. But then again, outside of personal projects and academic exercises, no one should be using macros. Messing with fundamental semantics of a language while other developers are working on the same project will certainly make you a ton more enemies than friends. I still have a grudge against the guy that used Ruby's method_missing and I spent an entire day hunting down a method that didn't exist. When I figured it out, I don't think I've ever been so pissed at someone before.

[patrec]

> No. Unless you're not familiar with Lisp-1 vs Lisp-2.

Just because "classical" defmacro is mildly awkward to use in Common Lisp and much more so in scheme does not mean that the only viable alternatives are R*RS style hygienic macros. Look at how e.g. clojure does it, it has a simple and perfectly adequate solution (a concise gensym notation, basically). As far as hygiene is concerned. Not so much in terms of generating good error messages.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

The problem with Ruby’s method missing is mostly that Ruby development generally doesn’t happen in an environment where discovering the existence of that method is easy. Macros are even better and tools like the slime macrostep expander make them relatively easy to deal with.